Second Chance
by ChristineX
Summary: Sometimes redemption can be found in the most unlikely places. Following the events of Terminator Salvation, Marcus Wright and Blair Williams attempt to navigate a shifting landscape of changing loyalties, even as they face an uncertain future together.
1. Chapter 1

Note: This story is based on events in the movie Terminator Salvation, using some ambiguities in the story line. While I've been a fan of the Terminator movies since 1984 (I think going to see it in the theater was date # five or six with the ex), I haven't read any of the Terminator Salvation novels, so some characterizations or details in this story may contradict what was written there. I suppose it's a slight AU, a "what-if?" - but mostly it's my attempt to exorcise a demon plotbunny.

* * *

One

Exhaustion had turned Kate Connor's voice into a flat monotone. "This isn't going to work."

Something stirred deep within Blair Williams. She had spent so many years trying to blank her emotions, to perfect the mask of efficiency she presented to the world, that at first she wasn't quite sure what she was feeling. Was it hope? Maybe. Hope, overlaid with a nagging sense of guilt. How could she hope for Marcus to live, when his survival meant John Connor's inevitable death?

Both men lay on gurneys within a field hospital tent. IV drips ran into both their right arms, although Blair wondered how much good an anesthetic would do for Marcus, who was more machine than flesh and blood. But his eyes were closed, his face slack and oddly peaceful. Not the same for John Connor, who even in induced unconsciousness looked troubled, mouth pressed into a firm line, a deep furrow showing between his brows.

"What do you mean, it's not going to work?" Blair asked, after she forced herself to look away from Marcus. If she stared too long at his mouth, she'd only think again about what those lips had felt like when pressed against hers.

If she had anything left of a sense of humor, she might have been amused by the fact that it was a machine who'd given her the best kiss in…how many years? All right, probably the best kiss she'd ever had, if she were going to be perfectly honest.

Kate ran an abstracted hand over the curve of her stomach. Only a few months to go, Blair estimated, and no guarantee the father would be around to see his son. Or daughter, as the case may be.

"Well, aside from the obvious insanity of attempting an organ transplant in a field hospital, their types don't match," Kate replied. "I'd hoped that Cyberdyne would have used a universal donor for its prototype. But I guess beggars couldn't be choosers." She paused, staring down at her husband's still face. "John's A-positive. Marcus is B-positive. If I put Marcus's heart into John, he dies."

Again Blair felt that flutter of terrible hope. "There nothing you can do to make it work?"

A quick head shake, and then Kate looked away from John, off into the gathering dusk. Night would be here soon, and although Blair knew intellectually that Skynet's local base had been destroyed, and that she could sleep safely tonight for the first time in too many years to count, a chill still moved down her spine. The machines had always taken advantage of the coming of darkness. It made their prey that much easier to hunt.

"Science has come far, but not that far," Kate said, after a long pause. "The transplant alone would be a horrendous shock to his system. But transplanting a non-compatible organ? He'll suffer an acute hemolytic reaction. That in combination with the transplant would certainly kill him."

Her tone was still dull, expressionless. Only the pallor of her face and the barely visible tremor in her hands gave the lie to her apparent calm.

"How long?" Blair asked. The question was probably just more salt on Kate Connor's wounds, but she had to know. Maybe they could still do something, given enough time.

"He's strong," Kate replied, and her voice shook at last. "Five or six hours, I think." Then her gaze seemed to sharpen, her blue eyes focusing on Blair as if really seeing her for the first time. "Why?"

An idea had begun to take shape in Blair's mind. A horrible one, she was forced to admit, but if God even existed, then he was a cruel master. After all the death and pain and suffering he had inflicted, what difference would a bit more make?

She stared down at Marcus and tried to see him only as something that could aid in the success of her plan. Anything else would be stupid. Maybe he couldn't save John Connor's life by donating a heart, but Marcus still might be able to ensure that the Resistance had a leader come morning.

* * *

Light filtered through his eyelids. Marcus could feel himself frown. Wasn't he supposed to be dead? How could he achieve the absolution he sought if he still lived?

Something dark blocked the light, and he blinked. The blurry darkness resolved itself into a face, one he recognized. Blair. She had been the last thing he remembered before he lay down on the operating table. If he had somehow made it to heaven, he supposed it was only fitting that her face would be the first thing he saw.

Her words, however, were anything but heavenly. "Get up, Marcus. We've got a job to do."

His brain didn't seem to be working quite as well as it used to. No wonder, with the hack job Skynet had done on him…not to mention the chip he had yanked out of the back of his head. "What?"

In response, she dumped a heavy bundle on top of him.

His reflexes seemed to be functioning a bit better than his brain. He grabbed the bundle, and saw that it consisted of a camo jumpsuit, underwear, and a pair of combat boots. No wonder it weighed so much.

"We're moving out, soldier," she said. "Five minutes."

And with that she turned and left, disappearing into the darkness.

He sat up cautiously and looked around. They'd obviously moved him while he was unconscious; this was a much smaller tent than the medical facility where he'd been placed under anesthesia. For now he was the only occupant, although several other cots filled the space.

Not heaven, then, but the Resistance camp John Connor called home base.

What the hell had happened? Marcus laid a hand against his chest and felt his heart beating away there, just as it always had. Of course, his perception of it was now forever altered. It wasn't a cage of bone that protected the fragile organ, but an endoskeleton of unknown metal. For whatever reason, the medics seemed to have left his heart there for the time being.

Frowning, he pulled off the papery gown he'd been wearing and tossed it on the ground. Then he drew on the clothing Blair had given him. Somehow the simple actions of putting on the jumpsuit and boots made him feel a little more human. Then he felt an ironic smile twist his lips.

_You're no more human than that grenade launcher_, he thought, and gave the M-79 someone had left propped up against one of the cots a sour look.

Well, maybe that was exaggerating things just a little. He was pretty sure Blair wouldn't have been quite so enthusiastic about kissing a grenade launcher.

His memory could be playing tricks on him, but he could almost feel the touch of her mouth on his even now. That kiss couldn't have been a dream, or a hallucination brought on by the anesthetic.

Even if it had been real, it didn't seem as if there were going to be any repeats of that tender interlude in the near future. The Blair he had just seen was all business.

He wouldn't allow himself to sigh. Instead, he gave the laces on his boots one last tug, then stood. Maybe he wasn't strictly a man, but he knew he'd go out and take on this mission like one. And maybe somewhere along the line, Blair would explain to him just what the hell was going on.

* * *

Despite herself, Blair felt the breath catch in her throat as Marcus approached, his tall silhouette clearly outlined under the harsh glare of the camp's LED lighting. No hiding in darkness tonight - Skynet had suffered a crushing blow. The Resistance had a little grace, a precious space of time before the machines began encroaching from their out-of-state bases.

Marcus looked rested and healthy. No way to tell that he'd been through punishing combat that would have killed a normal man. Kate had mentioned something about his tissue being engineered to heal more quickly than a regular human's, but Blair hadn't really understood what that meant until she gazed up at a man who appeared to have done nothing more taxing than lie in bed for a few days.

Of course, thinking about Marcus and bed at the same time probably wasn't the world's greatest idea. She crossed her arms and said, "According to Kate Connor, we have five hours. So let's get moving." Without looking to see if he followed her, Blair turned and headed for the Jeep she'd already had outfitted with the necessities: weapons, ammunition, a spare fuel container, a bag of medical implements that Kate had put together, a cooler stocked with precious ice.

That last item wasn't usual for a nighttime foray, but absolutely necessary for her plan to work.

She climbed into the driver's seat, noting as she did so that Marcus took his place on the passenger side without comment or complaint. Good. This was going to be difficult enough without bickering over who had more right to drive the Jeep.

The first few miles passed by in silence. She knew the terrain around here so well she could probably navigate it in her sleep if necessary, but driving by moonlight was always chancy. The earth slept uneasily, and it could shift at any time, tumbling boulders across her regular routes, or even bringing down entire hillsides. She would rather have flown, but her A-10 wasn't going anywhere, and she was grounded until the Resistance scouts could find a replacement.

After they had emerged from a ravine and started down what used to be Interstate 15, Marcus stirred in his seat and shifted to look at her. "You going to tell me where we're going?"

"We're going to pay a visit to some old friends."

He said nothing, but only stared at her. She couldn't take her eyes off the broken asphalt before them, but she still felt the weight of that gaze, heavy with unspoken questions.

"Connor can't use your heart," she said shortly. "Wrong blood type. So we're going on a hunting trip."

More silence.

"Those charming individuals back at the race track? Very accommodating of you to just knock them out and not kill them. I'm hoping that one of them will come in useful."

Marcus didn't pretend to misunderstand. "You'd kill three men on the chance that one of them has a compatible blood type?"

Concern over human life from a Skynet spy? That was rich.

_He wasn't really a spy_, a small, quiet part of her mind told her. _At least, not wittingly._

That may have been the truth. However, at the moment Blair wasn't sure she wanted to examine the implications of a cyborg who seemed to have more issue with cold-blooded killing than she did.

"I'd kill three hundred men if it meant saving John Connor," she said. "Without him, the Resistance is finished."

To her surprise, Marcus gave a grim chuckle. "Sounds like that's one thing you and Skynet can agree on."

She didn't bother to reply. She didn't think the situation was funny at all. He hadn't seen the stricken expression on Kate Connor's face, or the way John Connor's features had begun to look waxy and pale, sunken and gray. Blair had watched too many people die not to know what that meant. He had hours at best. If some scumbags had to give up their lives so John could live, so be it.

Several retorts came to mind, but she settled for saying, "Guess I'm smarter than I look, then."

The Jeep hit a particularly deep pothole, and she had to direct her attention away from Marcus, back to the treacherous road before them. After slowing a bit and downshifting to get better traction, she added, "You going to give me any problems?"

He stared straight ahead. The moonlight glinted in his short-cropped fair hair. "No. Only reason I didn't finish them off before was because I didn't think they were worth the effort."

It might have been the truth. At the moment, she didn't much care. All that mattered now was that Marcus seemed prepared to cooperate. Then again, why wouldn't he? Killing in cold blood came naturally to Terminators, didn't it?

She wasn't sure she wanted to admit that Marcus Wright was a Terminator. If she stopped to think about it, she knew the reason for her reticence. She just didn't like it all that much. It was crazy to think that he could be anything more to her than an ally.

And an ally was all that she needed right now.

_Keep telling yourself that a thousand times, and maybe you'll believe it_, she thought.

Her jaw set, she pressed her foot down on the accelerator, speeding through the desolation that used to be a well-traveled highway, rocketing them toward the men who might, by dying, allow future generations to live.

* * *

He might have tried arguing with her. From the expression on her face - or rather, the lack thereof - he sort of got the feeling that any arguments would have been a waste of time.

His memories hadn't died along with the rest of his past. He could remember everything from his life. More than he wanted to, actually. But all those memories didn't help him much in dealing with Blair Williams. He'd never known a woman like her, even though there had been plenty of women back in those days when the world had careened blithely forward in a haze of self-absorption and excess, never dreaming that it would all end in a blaze of nuclear light.

In a way, he was glad they drove through the darkness now. The moon and stars overhead hadn't changed. The cold, dry desert air brought back memories of camping trips, of times before his mother died and the world had gone to hell. During the day the sunlight had a washed-out, dirty hue to it, like something wrung out and robbed of all energy. It only served to illuminate what a wasteland the world had become.

He thought of John Connor, who somehow had managed to avoid death so far. Did his life truly count for more than the lives of the men Blair planned to kill?

Blair seemed to think so, which to Marcus was the only thing that mattered. He'd thrown in his lot with humanity. The mad scientists at Cyberdyne had tried to turn him into a machine. Now he was being offered another chance to prove how badly they had failed.

The Jeep slowed. Off in the distance Marcus spotted the bulk of the abandoned race track, its outlines stark black in the harsh moonlight. A fire burned near the entrance, but other than that he saw no sign of life.

Which meant absolutely nothing. Anyone still alive this many years after Judgment Day had both a strong instinct for survival and a lucky streak a mile wide.

_Luck's about to run out_, he thought, then asked, "So what's the plan?"

She didn't look at him as she replied, "I spotted an abandoned semi about a quarter-mile from the track. I figured we'd hide the Jeep there and then go in by foot. We'll split up - you take the north side, and I'll take the south. Shoot to kill. Just make sure you aim for the head. We can't risk a shot anywhere in the thorax."

It probably would have worked. Marcus paused for a moment, waiting while she maneuvered the Jeep off the highway and into the shelter of a ruined Mayflower moving truck. She'd turned off the headlights a few miles back. With the moon so bright overhead, they weren't necessary and would have given their quarry advance notice of their presence.

He asked, "You ever kill anyone?"

At last she turned and met his gaze straight on. He tried not to admire her tip-tilted almond eyes and full mouth, and failed miserably.

"What's that got to do with anything?" she demanded.

"Have you?"

Her lashes dropped, and she glanced away. "No." Then her chin went up, and she added, "I've been on more missions than I count. I've shot up HKs, T-600s, and an assload of scouts. I think I can handle a few sleazebags."

She probably could. They'd only gotten the drop on her before because she'd been wounded and unarmed. That wasn't the point.

"Killing a person takes something out of you," Marcus said, choosing his words with care. He'd never been the type for navel-gazing, but sitting on Death Row gave a person plenty of time for contemplation. "I don't care whether you think it's for a good cause or not. Just the knowledge that you were the one to take someone's life - it changes you. Sure, you're a fighter, but you've been fighting machines, not men."

No answer. She just sat there, tension in every line of her slender body. Still she wouldn't look at him.

"Let me do it," he said.

Finally she spoke. "Take on all three of them at once?"

"Think I can't handle it?"

She gave a short laugh. "Oh, I'm pretty sure you can handle it. I guess I just don't like the idea of sitting here like a stupid female in one of those romance novels my mother used to read. Can't get my hands dirty - I might break a nail!"

He thought he understood. Sometimes sitting and waiting could be far worse than plowing into the heart of the action. That didn't mean he was going to let her get within fifty feet of the lowlifes who'd made the race track their home. But he also knew that telling her he wanted to protect her would only anger her more.

A different tack might work. "Did Dr. Connor tell you how to remove their hearts?"

Blair shot him a suspicious glance, but she answered readily enough. "Yes. Drew me a little diagram and everything." She patted the breast pocket of her leather flight jacket. "Told me I was insane first, of course. Then she wanted to know why we couldn't just knock them unconscious and bring them back to base to be operated on. But that would have made her or her assistants the killer. This was my plan. I should take the responsibility."

"I understand that," he replied, then made sure to push on before she could take his words as agreement. "But if anything happens to you, then we're really shit out of luck, aren't we? I can't perform that procedure."

"Nothing is going to happen."

Jesus Christ, she was stubborn. Marcus fought off the desire to grab her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. A least, he told himself that was why he had to resist the impulse to take hold of her.

"You don't know for sure," he said. "Things go wrong all the time. You of all people should know that, considering how we met."

A scowl puckered her brow in response to that remark. No, she probably didn't appreciate him reminding her of how she'd lost her plane, but he wasn't going to scruple at bringing up painful issues if it helped him to drive his point home.

"I don't like it," she said.

"You don't have to like it." Surprising himself, he reached out and took her hands in his. Her fingers were rough and callused, but the bones underneath felt fragile as a hummingbird's wing. "Let me do this."

He didn't bother to say that, unlike her, he had no humanity to lose. It had been given up long ago, on an operating table at Cyberdyne. Or maybe even earlier, as he'd gunned down his backstabbing brother and the two cops who'd been called to break up the fight.

For a moment she held herself still, gazing down at their intertwined fingers. She made no move to pull away. Marcus didn't know her well enough to be able to read her expression, but it seemed that she wrestled with her own thoughts. Then, very gently, she unlaced her fingers from his.

"There's a Glock and extra clips in the back," she said. "I'd advise against the shotgun."

It was the only capitulation he'd get, but he didn't need her to tell him he was right and she was wrong. It was enough that she'd stopped arguing. Anyway, they'd wasted enough time already.

He said only, "Thanks," and reached into the back seat to retrieve the handgun and two clips. He doubted he'd need that much - the race track trio hadn't struck him as particularly cunning or resourceful - but, as he'd told Blair, you never knew. It was conceivable that they could get the drop on him if he weren't careful.

As he reached for the door handle, she leaned across the gear shift and tucked a radio unit into the breast pocket of his jumpsuit. "Call me when it's done. I can be there in a minute."

He nodded. His own heart had begun to beat a little faster - at the thought of the confrontation ahead, he told himself. It couldn't have been the feel of her hand sliding across his chest as she secured the radio in his pocket.

Then he let himself out of the Jeep and forced himself not to look back. She'd wait for his call. All he had to do was get this over with as quickly as possible.

The bright moonlight was both blessing and curse, for while it helped smooth his journey across the quarter-mile or so that separated the abandoned rig and the race track, it also made him far too visible. Some cover was afforded by other derelict vehicles, and he did his best to zigzag among them while moving ever closer to his destination.

If he were very lucky, he might be able to catch them off-guard. The news of the Resistance victory against Skynet's San Francisco base had been broadcast on all available frequencies; if the men at the race track had a radio, then maybe they would think this was one night where they wouldn't have to be vigilant.

A man could hope, anyway.

His last jog had brought him within ten yards of the fire that crackled away at the entrance to the race track. It seemed to come from a broken pipe rather than a fire deliberately built. He'd seen fires like this all over Los Angeles. You'd think any sources of natural gas would have burned themselves out by now, but apparently not.

Marcus paused in the shelter of a broken-down structure that had probably once been a guard shack. The only sound was the soft hissing of the fire, and an occasional rustle in the scrubby vegetation that surrounded the track. Just some nocturnal animal, he decided, after a moment in which he held himself completely still and listened intently. The sounds were too light to have been made by a full-grown man.

When the men had attacked Blair, she'd said it looked as if they'd come from the interior of the race track. Made sense, he supposed - their camp would be hidden to the outside observer, and the passageways under the stands would make it easy for them to move around without being seen. So far the place seemed deserted, but he hoped that just meant they were shacked up somewhere inside. It would be a hell of a thing for him and Blair to have come all this way, just to find the men had departed for places unknown. He didn't want to think what he'd do if all or even one of them had died of the injuries he'd doled out during their last encounter. Maybe a concussion or two and some sprains or even a dislocated shoulder, but that wasn't the sort of thing that would kill a man.

He chambered a round and moved through the front entrance, hugging the wall and staying in the shadows. Something rustled at his feet, and he started before he realized it was a discarded program, the ink bleached by the ruthless California sun. It didn't matter that he couldn't read the date on the paper. He knew what it said.

At the far end of the track he spotted the uneasy flicker of a campfire. Dark shapes huddled around it, unmoving. Even in the moonlight it was difficult to be sure, but Marcus thought he could count three. Didn't look as if they'd posted a guard.

Stupid of them. Lucky for him.

Still, it wouldn't do to take chances. He continued his circuit of the track, staying close to the wall that separated the outfield dirt from the first row of bleachers. A tumbleweed drifted across the broken asphalt of the track, skeletal in the bleached light.

If something seems too easy, it's usually because it is. Marcus was approximately ten feet away from his quarry when an alarm began to shriek. At once the trio began to move, their guns quick gleams as they were drawn from their hiding places within the sleeping bags.

Shit.

He didn't stop to think. Thinking could get you killed. Instead he aimed the Glock at the man closest to him, sighting on his scruffy, bearded head. A quick squeeze of the trigger, and he went down, a neat black hole centered in his forehead.

By then the first victim's companions had gotten to their feet. Marcus found himself looking down the barrel of a riot shotgun and decided he actually would prefer to live after all. He dropped to the ground, shooting at the man's kneecap as he did so. A scream of pain signaled that he'd hit his target, and he aimed once more and fired.

Blood bubbled up from the man's throat, black in the moonlight. Not quite as clean as the first shot, but death by exsanguination was still dead.

A bullet whistled past his shoulder, and Marcus shifted his attention from the throat-shot man to his lone surviving companion. The man held a silver-plated revolver, probably stolen from someone's collection. Of course, where he got it didn't really matter.

"We let her go!" the man blurted. His speech sounded slurred; quite probably they'd been sleeping off a good drunk. The revolver wobbled in his hand.

As if to confirm Marcus' suspicions, glass clinked as the man's booted foot struck a bottle hidden somewhere inside the ratty sleeping bag.

"You did," Marcus agreed. "So I'll make this quick."

The last shot echoed off the concrete walls that enclosed the track. The man dropped at once, blood beginning to ooze from a forehead wound nearly identical to his dead companion's.

Marcus gave the place a quick scan, just in case they had a fourth friend stashed away somewhere, but he saw no one else. He fished the radio out of his pocket. "Marcus here."

Blair's voice came to him almost immediately. "You got 'em?"

"Like fish in a barrel. Bring the meat truck on over."

"Got it."

The radio crackled into silence, and Marcus returned it to his pocket. While he waited for Blair, he performed a quick, methodical search of the three men and their belongings. The Resistance survived on what it could scavenge; he wasn't about to leave anything valuable behind.

He had stacked up three shotguns, an assortment of handguns, and two rocket launchers, along with a decent supply of freeze-dried camping food, by the time she arrived. The sleeping bags weren't fit for use, and neither was the men's clothing, but at least he felt he'd been able to find something worthwhile.

"Been shopping, I see," Blair remarked, after she'd retrieved the ice chest and small bag of medical instruments from the cargo area in the back of the Jeep.

"Someone should be able to use this stuff."

She nodded, but moved past him to kneel next to the man who had been shot in the throat. "We'd better do this one first."

"We?"

In reply, she pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket and shoved it in his hand. "You've just been promoted to attending nurse."

* * *

She'd refused to let herself worry. Maybe he wasn't exactly a Terminator, but Marcus could take more punishment than any living man, and she'd seen what he could do in action. Those three scumbags wouldn't know what hit them.

Still, a wash of relief so great that it made her briefly queasy came over her when she heard Marcus' voice on the radio, telling her it was safe to come and retrieve the hearts. Analyzing that relief would require mental energies she couldn't spare at the moment, so instead she just kicked the Jeep into gear and roared off for the race track.

Marcus' strike had been almost surgical in precision. She quickly assessed the situation after she got out of her vehicle and decided it would be best to work on the man with the wound in his throat first. He'd lost an awful lot of blood.

Kate Connor had made up the field kit for her. Blair had some fairly extensive first aid training - most people in the formal Resistance did - but it was a far cry from learning how to extract a bullet or knock a dislocated shoulder back into place to opening a man's chest cavity in order to retrieve a major internal organ. No time for squeamishness, though. She drew out the scalpel.

"Show me the diagram."

Marcus spread open the instructions Kate had written, turning the sheet to take full advantage of the moonlight. His fingers left dirty smudges of gunpowder against the paper.

There were actually two diagrams - a quick sketch showing where to make the initial incision, and another, more detailed one with the cuts to sever the pulmonary artery and the left atrium marked in red. Blair bit her lip, then cut into the man's clammy flesh.

Kate hadn't warned her about the blood. It pooled up, dark and viscous as tar in the moonlight, and Blair choked back the bile that rose in her throat. No time for puking like a teenager after her first real drunk.

"The syringe," she said. "Next to the clamps."

Quickly he reached into the medical bag and handed the syringe to her. As she plunged it into the man's heart, Marcus asked, "What's that for?"

"Potassium chloride. Keeps the heart from trying to beat."

And it seemed to work. She hadn't realized that the muscle would continue to pulse after its host was dead, but Kate had assured her the shot was necessary. The heart now lay quiescent. Time to make the real incisions.

The moonlight, bright as it was, still didn't make a very good substitute for the harsh lights of an operating theater. But she couldn't wait until daylight. She stared at the sketch again, memorizing the pattern of muscles and veins. Just a few quick cuts, and she'd be done.

Easy enough to say. Tougher to do.

She shifted slightly so that the opening in the man's chest was a little more clearly illuminated. Then she picked up the scalpel and set to work.

It actually went faster than she had thought it would. Or maybe it was simply that she refused to really think about what she was doing, and focused instead on the instructions Kate had given her. Within a few minutes, the heart was free of its connective tissue.

"Ice chest," she said shortly, and Marcus lifted the lid for her. With exaggerated care she laid the heart on its bed of ice.

She began to sit back on her heels and breathe a sigh of relief, but then realized she still had two more to go.

_Easy peasy_, she told herself, reciting the old rhyme her mother had used back when she was coaxing Blair to do her chores. _Nothing to it._

The next two did go faster. Even so, she kept glancing at the chronometer strapped to her wrist. They'd already been out for almost three hours. The return trip should take around two. They'd be cutting it close.

_You just had to mention_ cut_, didn't you?_ she thought, and stifled a wild laugh. Marcus would really think she had lost it if she started cackling like a madwoman.

"That's it," she said, after she tamped down the lid of the ice chest. The bloody instruments she tossed back into the medical bag. A proper cleaning for them would have to wait until they were back at base camp.

Marcus took the ice chest and strapped it into the rear seat of the Jeep. Then he motioned to the guns and other items he'd looted from their three victims' camp. "I'll take care of that. You get in."

She wanted to argue with him, but realized suddenly how tired she really was, how her hands seemed to be shaking with reaction. What the hell? She'd run strafing missions over Skynet facilities, had her damn engine shot off, navigated mine fields, and yet it was cutting the hearts out of three men that finally laid her low?

Well, when she put it that way -

"And I'll drive," he added.

"Whatever," she said, and climbed into the passenger seat. At that point she was more than happy to let him dodge potholes all the way back to camp.

He moved with a quick efficiency that would have been pleasing to watch if she hadn't been so damn tired. Instead she waited in her seat, glad of the chance to let someone else do the work for once.

Loading the Jeep only took a few minutes. Then he got in next to her, noted that she'd already put the key in the ignition, and gave her a quick nod of approval.

They took off at a speed she wasn't sure she would have attempted. But he had a cyborg's reflexes, slaloming over the rough road, avoiding the worst patches in a show of skill she had to grudgingly admit was better than hers.

_But get me up in the sky, and I'll kick your ass_, she reflected, and smiled a little.

She hadn't thought he could watch her and the treacherous highway at the same time, but he asked, "What's so funny?"

There was no real way to explain. She lifted her shoulders. "Everything."

"Right."

He sounded so like a - well, like a guy. Hard to believe that under that coating of hard muscle and those pretty blue eyes he was a machine just like all the rest. Not exactly like the rest, she supposed. Somehow he'd been able to reject his programming and throw his lot in with the humans. John Connor had baldly stated that he would never have gotten out of Skynet's facility without Marcus' help. That had to count for something.

It counted for a lot, actually. And now he was assisting in a very different kind of rescue. But would it be enough?

She wasn't sure she wanted to know the answer to that question.

* * *

Kate Connor was waiting for them, her face ghostly in the glaring lights of the medical tent. But white as she was, her husband looked even more pale, as if every drop of spare blood had somehow been leached out of him in the hours since Marcus and Blair had left the camp.

"You've got them?" Kate asked, as she watched Marcus undo the straps that had held the ice chest securely in place during the bumpy ride.

"Yes," Blair assured her. As difficult as acquiring those hearts had been, she would still rather have done that than sit back at camp, waiting and watching her husband die.

Kate nodded. "Set them on that table. I'll need to type them."

Marcus did as she instructed and then stepped aside. Feeling a bit helpless, Blair looked on as Kate drew blood samples from each heart and did something complicated with slides and a microscope.

"First one is O-positive," she said. "We can use that if necessary. But I'll check the other two in case there's a direct match, which of course would be better."

Her tone sounded calm, matter-of-fact. Maybe the realization that at least one of the hearts would work had helped to relieve some of the terrible worry which must have been preying on her. Blair didn't know if she could have been quite that composed if it had been someone she loved lying on a gurney, his life slowly slipping away. Hell, she'd risked everything to bust Marcus out of detention, and she barely even knew him.

"No go on the second," Kate announced. "B-negative. Checking the last sample now."

Someone must have announced their arrival in camp, because two more medics slipped into the tent, pushing past Blair and Marcus.

"And we have a winner," said Kate. "A-positive. Let's get to work, people."

Marcus bent down to whisper in Blair's ear. "We'd better get out of the way."

He was right. They'd done their job; now it was time for the medical staff to do theirs.

She followed him outside. The moon that had lit their way earlier was now slipping down toward the hills to the west, and the air felt cold against her face. Funny how she'd hardly noticed the chill earlier.

The memory came to her of how she had rested her cheek against Marcus' chest and pulled herself close to him after they had fled the abandoned race track. She'd told him she only wanted to share their body heat as protection against the cold night. Maybe it had been the truth. She wasn't sure anymore.

He stopped under a California live oak tree, far enough away from the bright lights of the med tent that they provided only a comforting background glow. "Think he'll live?"

She had no words of comfort to give. "I don't know."

Something touched her hand, and she started before she paused and realized it was Marcus' fingers curling around hers. His calluses felt rough against her skin. Warm and real. Human.

"Will you wait with me?"

The question had been asked casually enough, but somehow Blair knew her answer meant more to him than he was willing to say. She glanced up into his face, at the taut lines of his mouth. Time to decide, she realized. He had been torn between worlds, and had made his choice. Now she had to let him know it had been the right one.

"Yes," she said, her voice firm. "Yes, I'll stay with you."


	2. Chapter 2

Let me just say how awed I am by the response to this story - I know this isn't the biggest fandom out there, so I really didn't know what to expect. Thank you to everyone for their reviews and story alerts and favorites! When I wrote the first installment of this story, I wasn't quite sure where I was going to take it next, but a prompt from the bi-weekly fic challenge over at the terminatorfic community at LiveJournal gave me the idea that inspired this chapter (and some of the ones to follow). I hope you enjoy it!

* * *

Two

_This guy is crazier than a shithouse rat_, Blair thought. She tried to keep the scorn from showing on her face but didn't know how successful she managed to be.

They'd all seen men like him. He could have been anywhere from his early thirties to his late fifties. Impossible to know for sure, what with the lines engraved in his face, the skin pocked with scabs, the sparse and patchy hair - not from pattern baldness, but too much exposure to the hot spots that dotted the post–Judgment Day landscape.

Most of them lived a solitary existence, eking out some kind of hardscrabble subsistence at the fringes of the great eastern deserts. They didn't interfere with the Resistance, but they wanted no part of it, either. Organize, and you risked making a target of yourself for the machines.

But this one had approached the base, for whatever reason. Maybe he'd somehow gotten wind of Skynet's recent defeat. Or maybe he'd just tired of living off iguanas and rattlesnakes. Right now he was slurping up the contents of an unheated can of pork and beans the way Blair's mother used to inhale a pint of Ben and Jerry's during a particularly bad PMS episode.

"Everything you need," the desert rat said, and waved his fork for emphasis, although not before he'd licked it clean. "Rations. Ammunition. Gasoline. Vehicles." Was it her imagination, or did he shoot a wild blue-eyed glance in her direction before returning his attention to John Connor? "Planes."

_Don't forget the unicorns and ponies_, Blair thought wryly.

She looked over at Connor. As usual, his expression was almost blank, revealing little of his thoughts. He sat propped up in a camp chair that Kate had altered to give it more padding. At five days past his recent heart transplant, he shouldn't have been sitting up at all. He should have been lying in an ICU someplace with a team of doctors monitoring him for any sign of rejection. Unfortunately, ICUs and teams of doctors were in pretty short supply these days.

Anti-rejection drugs were not, thank God. Kate had explained it simply enough, the morning after John's grueling procedure. She had a whole arsenal of syringes at the ready, filled with miracles drugs that would keep him from rejecting the heart. Despite the fact that she'd spent all night working to keep her husband alive, she had sounded steadier once it became clear that he'd at least live through the next day. "It's getting harder to find antibiotics and antivirals and painkillers," she'd said. "Even birth control pills. But there's not a lot of call for anti-rejection medication."

Blair couldn't argue with that. The Resistance had medical teams that had been able to manufacture simple sulfa drugs and some antibiotics. Painkillers were more difficult, since the opiates a lot of them required weren't something that came easily to hand here in 2018 California. Hormones? Forget about it. People used medications years out of date and hoped for the best. At least they'd had the anti-rejection drugs; the Resistance salvage teams always took everything that wasn't nailed down, figuring someone, somewhere might eventually have a use for it.

A single word from John. "Where?"

"East of here. Two, three days walking."

"Yet we've never found it."

His delivery was too flat for irony, but Blair heard the skepticism in his words anyway.

She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, then glanced past Connor to see Marcus watching her. Those blue eyes were sharp as laser sights. He knew what the promise of aircraft meant to her. She was still grounded. No planes free - a pilot might come back to base without his plane, but it never happened the other way around. As close as she was to John, Blair knew she couldn't exactly ask him take another pilot's wings away, just for her sake. No, she'd have to wait until a new ride could be found.

After a second or two, she deliberately looked away from Marcus, back to John Connor. They'd had Connor's recovery to focus on the past week, that and moving the base to another location, one a good thirty klicks from where the last camp had been situated. There hadn't been any sign of Skynet activity, but John had ordered the move almost as soon as he was conscious. The only way to stay alive was to keep moving, to present a target that could never be nailed down.

At any rate, the frenzy of the move had kept her and Marcus from anything approaching a serious discussion of their relationship - if they even had one, she was forced to admit. They'd huddled together, that long night of John's operation, and heard the news of his recovery as the sun rose above the hills to the east. But Marcus had made no move to kiss her, and she didn't quite know how to feel about that.

The whole thing was crazy, if you looked at it logically. There were some women in the Resistance who had shut down that whole side of themselves, who refused to have anything to do with men. Blair hadn't gone quite that far - she'd allowed herself to have liaisons with fellow pilots or other Resistance fighters when the chemistry was right, even though there was no point in thinking about the future when each day held the promise of a bloody end. But it was better to have those few brief moments of heat than nothing.

What could she have with Marcus? Was he even capable of the physical act of love? She had no way of knowing for sure. It wasn't exactly the sort of thing a person could bring up in casual conversation. He probably had all the equipment; after all, he'd believed himself to be an ordinary man, and most ordinary men would have noticed something wrong if the below-belt components were lacking in some way. But still…

She realized she'd been woolgathering and had missed the desert rat's reply to John. Damn.

Marcus spoke for the first time, "I think it's worth investigating."

For a moment John said nothing. He frowned, fingers tapping on one arm of the chair. An IV tube trailed up from the crook of his elbow to a bag of saline solution suspended above his seat. "We can't spare many people for something that could be a wild-goose chase."

"You don't have to." Something that might have been a smile touched Marcus' mouth, and he met Blair's gaze squarely. "You want to go look for a new set of wings, Hickabick?"

* * *

There had been no real way for her to say no. They hadn't had much of a chance to talk these past few days, but he'd seen her glance up the few times a Resistance fighter flew overhead, seen an almost wistful look in her eyes whenever she passed by the abandoned barn cum machine shop they were currently using as a hangar to house the handful of planes the base still possessed. He knew the lack of a plane continued to wear away at her. She'd seemed cheerful enough as she helped with the relocation of the base and assisted in the installation of a new security perimeter, but she wasn't fooling anyone. Or maybe she was, but she sure didn't fool him.

The desert rat's story could be complete pie in the sky - and Marcus thought it probably was - but they couldn't risk allowing such a prize to go unplundered, just in case the man wasn't completely crazy from radiation. That was just another thing that had surprised Marcus about this improbable future he'd found himself in; there were hot spots everyone knew to avoid, but at least the whole planet hadn't turned into one big plain of fused radioactive glass.

And if he wanted to be perfectly honest, he had a few ulterior motives about getting Blair alone, away from the Resistance base.

John Connor's word was pretty much law, and somehow it had gone out around the camp that since Marcus had saved the other man's life, the denizens of the camp were to leave him alone. He'd heard the mutters of "cyborg" - and worse - and seen the suspicious looks thrown in his direction, but it stopped there. The situation could have been a lot worse. He could have been locked back up in the brig, his heroic acts at Skynet dismissed out of hand simply because he was one of _them_.

But he wasn't. He told himself that every day, whenever he looked in the mirror each morning to shave off the previous night's bristles, or every time he went to the latrine to take a leak. Did a machine grow a beard? Did a machine require bathroom facilities? Bluntly speaking, did a machine wake up with a spectacular case of morning wood after a night spent dreaming of the woman it wanted?

Marcus kind of doubted it.

Long he'd been born a man and had arrived on this planet about the same way as everyone else. His entry into this future world had been a little more unorthodox, but although the machines had done their best to control him, to weave their pernicious metal through every fiber of his body, somehow they hadn't quite manage to pollute his soul. Well, at least not any more than it already had been.

But though he felt some sort of gratitude for Connor's protection, the atmosphere at the Resistance base was still a little frosty. Kind of a tough place to make any overtures toward Blair. Maybe once they were out and away, far from those shifty-eyed stares and hostile whispers, she'd warm up to him a little. After all, she'd stayed with him the whole night while John received his stolen heart. She'd even let her fingers stray into his. True, it was the hand that hadn't been horribly mutilated at Skynet HQ, but at least it was a start.

His enhanced biology had done its job, though. Marcus glanced down at his left hand, now indistinguishable from his right. He supposed if you looked closely enough you could see a certain vagueness about the nail beds, how they weren't quite as formed as the ones on his right, but it wasn't as if he was going to be getting a manicure any time soon.

That was a laugh. The closest he'd ever gotten to a manicure was the time he'd ripped off a fingernail while yanking an engine block. Said block was a pristine 426 Hemi in a '68 Barracuda, and a vital piece of the car that the owner probably didn't want to part with, but such niceties had never bothered Marcus. A fingernail was a small price to pay for something worth so much on the black market.

A potentially much greater haul awaited him now, hidden somewhere in the wastes of the Mojave Desert. If he were the one to help Blair lay hands on her next plane, he could only imagine she'd be grateful. And he could think of all sorts of ways he'd like her to express her gratitude.

Now all he had to do was find the desert rat's mythical cache.

* * *

Blair had the feeling she'd somehow been neatly maneuvered into this expedition, but logically, it made sense. Although no one would say it, they all considered Marcus, if not expendable, at least someone they'd prefer to not have around, and she was just a grounded pilot. Sure, she'd been able to provide some muscle during the move to their current location, but until she got her wings back she wasn't going to be much use to anyone.

Some precious stores of food had been allotted them, and she'd asked to take Rufus, one of the camp's guard dogs, along as well. The dogs hadn't quite known what to do with Marcus - they knew he didn't smell right, but he must not have smelled like a Terminator, either. The camp's canine denizens tended to mill about, confused and uneasy, whenever he came in range.

For some reason, Rufus had warmed to Marcus best, and besides, Blair had a soft spot for the mutt. He was a rangy shepherd/border collie mix, lively but a fierce protector of the camp when the need arose. Like every one else at the Resistance base, Rufus took his job seriously.

The sun had barely peeked over the horizon when Blair shouldered her loaded pack and went to meet Marcus at the eastern perimeter of the base. Years ago it had been an almond farm, and a few frail-looking trees that had survived the post–Judgment Day climate change still dotted the landscape. He stood under one of those now, gazing eastward, Rufus in a similar attitude of wary watchfulness a few feet away. The Jeep Connor had requisitioned for their mission waited just inside the gate.

That gate wouldn't have kept out would-be almond thieves, let alone any of Skynet's machines. Just beyond the gate and its attached barbed-wire fence was a no-man's land dotted with mines, both pressure and magnetic. But Blair knew the safe path to take; she'd been one of the people who helped lay those mines. No chance of Marcus getting himself blown up this time.

She remembered the hideous damage the mines had inflicted, remembered the cold horror that struck her as she looked inside his chest and saw what Skynet had done to him. Blinking, she pushed those memories away, but not before a shiver passed over her.

"Cold?" asked Marcus. He made as if to move toward her, then stopped.

It was cold; a sullen overcast covered the sky, and an icy little breeze snaked through the pitiful almond grove. But she was used to that by now. August in 2018 didn't mean the same as it had back before the machines dropped the bombs. Once summer had been a blur of bright skies and shimmering swimming pools, lazy days of ice cream and hot dogs and her family's annual trip to Disneyland. Now it just meant you wouldn't freeze your ass off quite as badly as you did the rest of the year.

"No," she replied. "I'm fine. You got your stuff loaded?"

"Ready to go." Another one of those odd little smiles ghosted around his mouth. "You driving?"

"Of course." She stepped past him and tossed her pack in the back of the Jeep. Marcus' rig was already there, along with a few precious boxes of ammo and a grenade launcher. A pump-action Mossberg and a hunting rifle were stowed in the back seat.

Their mission was simply recon at this point. Further questioning of the desert rat had led him to inform them that he hadn't seen any real defenses around this oasis of technology he'd found out in the depths of the Mojave, but that didn't mean much. The best defenses were the ones you couldn't see. He also hadn't spotted much in the way of activity, human or otherwise, but again, that meant squat. If a group of humans was somehow canny enough to hold onto that kind of loot even with both Skynet and the Resistance scouring the countryside for anything remotely useful, then they must be a force to be reckoned with.

And if it was a trap set by the machines -

Well, it wouldn't be the first time Blair had shot herself out of a tough place. Naturally she preferred to do it from behind the controls of an A-10, but she was pretty handy with a variety of weaponry if the situation called for it.

Rufus, clearly realizing that they were about to set out, jumped in the back seat and wagged his tail. Blair repressed a grin. Even nuclear holocaust and hordes of rampaging robots weren't enough to keep a dog from enjoying a car ride.

Without comment, she climbed into the driver's seat and buckled the harness. All Resistance vehicles were furnished with equipment that would have satisfied a NASCAR safety inspector - six-point safety belts, fire extinguishers, fuel kill-switches. Chances were that you'd run into some kind of trouble on the road, so every safeguard to protect precious human life was utilized.

Marcus went and opened the gate, then returned to the Jeep and got into his own seat. Somewhere along the way he'd picked up a pair of aviator-style sunglasses; he planted them on his nose and stared directly into the rising sun, which appeared to have found the one break in the clouds.

"You look like a pimp," Blair remarked. She fished her own sunglasses - a more subdued pair with polarized lenses and black curved frames - out of her pocket and put them on. Driving directly into the sun was always a bitch.

"Is that a good or a bad thing?"

"Guess."

She turned the key in the ignition. From behind her, Rufus let out a happy bark, one that was cut short as he apparently remembered he was only supposed to bark when Terminators were around.

She knew how he felt. Even though she'd rather be back behind the controls of a fighter plane, and even though she wasn't quite sure how she was going to handle being alone with Marcus for the next few days, a ripple of excitement moved through her. It was something to be away from the hunted urgency of the camp, out into the wind and the freedom of the open road. Skynet hadn't made a peep in the last week. Maybe the thrashing John and Marcus had given the machines was even worse than the analysts said. Maybe they'd be free of the machines for a month or even more.

Marcus raised his face to the wind as the Jeep began to move through the mine field. Blair couldn't really watch him, since she had to maintain focus on the narrow safe path that wound through the treacherous ground, but she couldn't miss the ripple of amusement in his voice as he said,

"I've been a lot of things in my time, but never a pimp. So you're saying there was a reason why no one had claimed these glasses from the supply closet?"

Despite herself, she smiled. "Something like that."

The gleaners brought everything to a central supply dump, where items were sorted into their respective storage areas. Clothes were harder to come by than one might think; people tended to wear stuff until it fell apart simply because there were no more factories manufacturing cloth, not to mention a dearth of people to construct garments even in the rare instances when fabric could be found. Stores and homes had been picked over years before. The same was true for accessories - shoes and belts and eyewear. That Marcus had been able to scrounge the aviators said something about their sartorial appeal.

They emerged from the mine field and began to rattle down the narrow track that led away from the erstwhile almond farm. This had never been the main road; that one was off to the west and intersected with what used to be Interstate 5. This was a one-lane job that had probably never been kept in good repair and now was more potholes than asphalt.

The desert rat had said he found the installation out in the desert wastes roughly northwest from Barstow. On good roads, the trip would normally have taken only three or four hours. There wasn't such a thing as a good road anymore, but Blair thought they still could make it well before sundown. She hoped so anyway; she'd prefer they did their initial recon while there was still some light out.

For awhile they were both silent. The track met up with a larger road that headed northeast, and Blair pulled onto that. John had sent them out with a GPS tracker, but she'd also studied the local road maps carefully the night before. They were good Army Corps of Engineers maps, too, not the usual Triple-A ones. Who knows where John had gotten them, but he'd always had an uncanny knack for digging up the most useful stuff.

It wasn't until they'd gone a good five miles or so down the road that Marcus said thoughtfully, "You know, Skynet might have done Connor a favor."

This time Blair figured it was safe enough to look over at him. "Excuse me?"

"Everyone's been going off about how he's the savior of mankind, the leader of the Resistance, right?"

She wasn't sure she liked the sarcastic tone in which he'd asked the question, but she knew she couldn't really argue. Some people tended to treat John like the second coming of Christ.

"That's the rumor."

"But as far as I could tell, he wasn't really running things. Sounds like he was getting his orders from Command."

"Yeah."

Marcus shrugged. "So Skynet blew up Command, right? All those fossils from last generation's armies - gone. So who's left to give John orders?"

Once he'd said it, it sounded so simple, but Blair had to admit to herself she really hadn't stopped to think about how things stood in the current structure of the Resistance. It had always been taken as fact that one day John would be in charge. The details of how he was supposed to end up the leader of humanity's remnants had always been a little hazy, though.

She wondered then if machines could appreciate irony. Artificial intelligence was one thing, but somehow it seemed uniquely human to be amused by the various twists fate could devise. Anyhow, she sort of doubted the bits of Skynet that remained would be pleased to learn that it was through the machines' actions that John had assumed the title of de facto leader of the Resistance.

"No one's left, I guess," she replied.

"Convenient, huh?"

Again she allowed herself to glance away from the road so she could meet Marcus' gaze. His eyes were hidden behind those ridiculous mirrored lenses, but he was smiling slightly.

"I hope you're not trying to say that John Connor had anything to do with - "

He cut her off. "Of course not. It was the machines doing what they do best: killing humans. But it does sort of bear out the prophecy, doesn't it? After all, it would've been a lot harder for John to take charge if he still had to contend with Command. Right?"

Some days she had the feeling of being stuck in a car with no brakes, one that was about to career off a particularly steep cliff. That sensation rose in her now. "Fate?"

A shrug. "I never had much use for that sort of thing. But if you people had intel from the future that John would lead you to victory - or whatever - then I guess all we're seeing now is the events that'll bring him to that point."

_No fate but what we make_. She'd heard the words so many times that now she thought she could hear them echoing in her dreams. But with time twisting in and out of itself like a nest of twining snakes, how could a person ever begin to distinguish cause and effect?

She made her tone deliberately hard. "And the rest of us are just along for the ride."

For a long moment he didn't say anything. Then he shifted in his seat so he faced her directly, even though she kept staring ahead, watching the road for any of the usual hazards: sinkholes, wrecked vehicles, treacherous expanses of gravel and shale.

At least, she told herself that was why she wouldn't turn to meet his gaze.

The smile never left his lips. He said, "I'm glad to take that ride."

* * *

No, she wasn't like any other woman he'd known. She'd understood him, he could tell that much. But the only acknowledgment of his comment had been the slightest lift of an eyebrow as she expertly maneuvered the Jeep around a sinkhole that looked as if it could have swallowed a Hummer.

Short of going down on bended knee and pledging his undying love for her, Marcus wasn't sure what else he was supposed to do. And even if he'd been crazy enough to pull a stunt like that, he had the feeling she would have just laughed at him.

Not that he knew much about love. Desire, sure. Lust, absolutely. He faced the physical evidence of both pretty much every morning when he woke up. In the old days he hadn't bothered with any notions of a higher connection between a man and a woman. His love life had consisted of a series of one-night stands in cheap motels or quick tumbles in the back seat of a car. Even the ones that had lasted a few weeks or a month at most had ended the second the women involved expressed a desire for more. He'd just been satisfying a biological urge. Nothing more and nothing less.

This, though. This was something different.

It might just be a need to make a human connection. Blair was the only woman he'd met in this future who looked at him with anything besides barely concealed horror. Wasn't it natural that he craved her presence, wanted someone around who more or less treated him like a man and not some monster out of a mad scientist's lab?

_No_, he thought, and glanced over at her again. Her gaze was still fixed forward, but her loose hair blew around her face in the breeze generated by their progress down the road that once had been Highway 58. The sun broke through the clouds for a few seconds, picking out sparks of red and copper in her dark hair. Something about her beauty awed him. It wasn't that he hadn't been with beautiful women in the past. But none of them had been her.

"Do I have a bug stuck in my teeth or something?" she asked.

He looked away at once. "Well - "

Rufus barked.

At once Marcus sat up straighter in his seat and began scanning the area around them. Nothing much to look at - while they hadn't hit the desert proper yet, the area around them was almost as desolate, just low rolling hills dotted with chaparral and the occasional stunted California live oak tree. The undulations of the landscape prevented him from seeing what lay ahead.

"What is it?" Blair asked. Her knuckles whitened against the steering wheel, and the Jeep picked up speed.

"Don't know." He pulled off the sunglasses and shifted in his seat to look back at Rufus. The dog barked again, and his teeth showed as he let out a low, guttural growl.

"Shit!"

The safety harness bit into Marcus' shoulder as Blair slammed on the brakes. Almost at the same moment, the acrid smell of burning gasoline hit his nostrils.

Their way was blocked by a large SUV - probably a Suburban or Expedition - that lay on its side, spanning both lanes of the two-lane highway. And rising from the wreckage was the familiar form of a T-600.

No time to stop and think. In one fluid movement he reached into the back seat and pulled out the short-barrel riot shotgun Blair had stashed there earlier. She'd made sure it was preloaded; all Marcus had to do was pump it and aim.

The heavy magnum shell impacted squarely in the machine's chest, and it reeled a bit. But that wasn't enough to stop it. Another shell followed, and another. The Terminator staggered, even as it lifted an arm equipped with a Vulcan cannon.

That was all the opening Marcus needed. By then Blair had skidded to a stop and had jumped out of the driver's seat, no doubt running for the grenade launcher in the cargo compartment. Rufus' crazed barking formed an odd counterpoint to the roaring of the flames from the wrecked vehicle.

Neither of them mattered at the moment. The only thing that counted was the dark space between the T-600's shoulder joint and its arm. Marcum aimed, and fired again.

The arm blew off, neatly dropping the attached Vulcan cannon to the ground. That didn't stop the Terminator, of course. Self-preservation wasn't in its vocabulary. It saw humans, and so had to kill them. It would crawl to them if necessary, and rip its victims apart with one metal claw.

Not if Marcus had anything to say about it. He lifted the shotgun and pumped it once again.

A wall of yellow flame roared past him. Cursing, he dropped to the ground, even as he felt bits of super-heated metal rain down on the exposed flesh of his hands and neck. When he raised his head again, he saw the smoking carcass of the T-600 lying on its back in the middle of the highway.

Getting up hurt more than he thought it would. He glanced over at Blair, who held the M79 in both hands, still pointed at the Terminator.

"Nice shooting, Tex," he remarked. "A little warning might have been nice."

She shrugged. "I knew you could survive a little scorching. Care to finish it off?"

True enough. As he looked down, he could see the bright pink-red of the second-degree burns on his hands already starting to heal over.

_Miracles of modern science_, he thought, and made his way over to the downed machine. It looked dead enough, the lower half of its body completely blown away. But he knew better.

A single shot from his gun at the back of its neck was enough to kill the red glow in its eyes forever. He looked away from the T-600 to see Blair returning to the Jeep and stowing the grenade launcher in the back seat. Then she cast a critical eye on the burning wreck of the SUV.

"Doesn't look like there's much to save, but we'd better check it out."

The vehicle had held a couple, probably a man and a woman. Marcus was glad that any distinguishing features had been completely burned away. They were just two ashy shapes in something that used to be a Suburban.

But the SUV had been packed to the gills, and some of its contents had spilled themselves on the roadway before the flames consumed the vehicle. In grim silence he helped Blair gather up cans of food, a bundle of clothing, a box of .357 rounds. They would all be welcomed back at the Resistance camp.

He smiled grimly. They may not have arrived at their final destination, but already he and Blair had found something to salvage on this trip.


	3. Chapter 3

Sorry that sometimes I'm a bit slow to update, but I promise that I will keep going forward with this one. Thank you to everyone for your reviews!

* * *

Three

"Where were you when it happened?"

Blair risked a quick glance over at Marcus. Through some miracle, they hadn't run into any trouble since encountering the T-600. And the road here was in halfway decent shape, with drifting sand the biggest hazard. She knew there was no real reason for her to have spent the last half-hour studying every minute variation in the asphalt's surface the way an H-K might scan a city block, looking for new victims.

"When what happened?"

"Judgment Day."

Involuntarily, her fingers tightened on the steering wheel. She'd spent the last fourteen years trying to forget that day of fire and rain, the day which drew an invisible line between everything she'd once been and everything she'd become. What was the point in dwelling on it? She'd lived. And she'd continue to live, no matter what Skynet threw at her.

"Why do you want to know?"

Marcus stared ahead through the pitted windshield, apparently focused on the barren landscape as it flashed by. This part of the world probably looked much as it always had; there hadn't been much worth bombing out in the wastes of the Mojave. Of course Skynet had made sure Edwards Air Force base was destroyed, but that facility had been located a good hundred miles from the section of the desert they drove through now.

Then he spoke. "I slept through the whole damn thing. If you can call it sleep. The world changed. I just want to know what it was like."

"People don't talk about it," she replied. That was an understatement. Judgment Day had taken on something of the aura of a past indiscretion in a marriage. It had happened, had caused a huge seismic shift in everyone's lives, but no one wanted to dwell on the details. Reliving the cataclysm wouldn't change anything. It certainly wouldn't bring back the world they had lost.

At first Marcus didn't say anything. He kept his gaze fixed forward, the bleak dun-colored landscape a constant flicker in the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses. The moment stretched out, endless as the road in front of them. Finally, "I'd really like to know. Maybe it would help."

If it had been anyone else, she probably would have told them to get stuffed. Who she'd been then had no bearing on the here and now. But then she wondered what it would be like to awake in a world where everything had changed, where the things you once believed were now lies, where everything you'd known and loved had been destroyed forever.

_Including yourself_, Blair reflected, and wondered whether the stray thought had been intended for herself or for Marcus. Surely nothing could be worse than realizing even you weren't really you anymore.

"I was seventeen," she said. "My father was an airplane mechanic at March Air Reserve Base down in Riverside. We didn't live on the base - our house was about fifteen miles away, in Temecula. Guess that's what saved my mother and me."

Skynet had been surgical in its strikes. Temecula hadn't been worth the effort, apparently, but the personnel and equipment at March had been seen as a threat. Although it was no longer an active-duty base, it had been wiped as thoroughly from the map as Edwards AFB, Camp Pendleton, Miramar, and countless others. Even at seventeen Blair had known the mushroom-shaped cloud rising from the northwest meant neither her father nor anyone else who had been on duty that day would ever be coming home.

She swallowed against the tightness in her throat, then hardened her tone. "My little sister was off at day camp. I never saw her again. She was twelve." The landscape wavered in front of her eyes, and Blair blinked the tears away. This was why no one ever discussed the past. It was an unhealed wound that would never stop bleeding.

Marcus might have murmured, "I'm sorry." It was hard to say. All she seemed to hear was a roaring in her ears, an echo of the cries of disbelief and rage and despair that had surrounded her that terrible day, wails of horror as the human population of Southern California began to realize what had happened. Their modest suburban neighborhood had turned into a frenzy of people rushing to grab everything in reach so they could run. Exactly where they'd thought they would go, Blair had never been able to figure out.

"My mom was the one who saved me," she went on. Somehow she managed to keep her voice steady. "Her family was from Nagasaki. My grandmother was a little girl when the bomb dropped. So I guess we're sort of hard-wired for survival. Anyway, my parents had earthquake kits in the garage. My mother and I grabbed those and went out, over the back wall. She said taking the car wouldn't work - the streets were already full of people trying to get away. We headed for the hills and hid out in a canyon. Some other families were up there, too. When the sun came up the next morning, the first batch of HK-Drones came with it."

She stopped there. Fine, now he knew where she'd been on Judgment Day. There was no point in detailing the next fourteen years of hiding and struggling and fighting. Each one of those days could be summed up in a single sentence: Do what you have to in order to stay alive.

Another one of those silences. Then a question she hadn't been expecting. "So did your father teach you how to fly?"

It was almost a relief. Of course she still missed her father, but she hadn't seen him die. He'd disappeared in a flash of white nuclear heat. Not like her mother, who had been shot to pulp by a T-600's laser cannon.

"Yes," Blair replied. By now she'd gotten so used to pushing unwanted memories away that she hardly noticed herself doing it anymore. Her voice was steady enough as she continued, "I was solo rated by the time I was fifteen. Just light craft, of course - no one at my dad's base was going to let a high school kid take a test drive on an F-4 - but even then I knew all I wanted to do was fly. That summer I was so excited; I'd been accepted into the aviation program at San Jose State and couldn't wait to start. Skynet put the kibosh on that idea, but I still ended up flying. Only now I get to shoot down as many of those bastards as I can."

He shifted in his seat, turning so he could face her. "Sounds like I got the better deal."

"What do you mean?"

A grim smile. "Sounds like the best way to get through Judgment Day was to already be dead."

* * *

He hadn't meant to disturb her. A casual observer probably wouldn't have noticed anything wrong. But he thought he'd gotten to know her a little more over the past few hours. He heard the brittle, too-careful precision of her words, saw her lips compress as she guided the Jeep over the crumbling highway.

No point in apologizing. It wasn't his style, and anyway, accepting an apology would mean she'd have to admit he'd upset her in the first place.

If someone had told him a few days ago that he'd actually be grateful to Serena Kogan and her crack-brained schemes, or glad that Skynet had kept him submerged in a coma all those years, he would have told them to put down the crack pipe. However, it had taken that insane combination of circumstances to bring him where and when he was now. He'd spent the nightmare of Judgment Day and the dark years that followed in a sleep so deep it might as well have been death. And that sleep had been mercifully dreamless.

Blair wasn't a dream, though. She was flesh and blood and wonderfully, disturbingly alive. In the past he would never have aspired to a woman like her. Wanted her, sure. But he would have recognized the fact that a guy who spent his free time jacking cars, running guns, and providing muscle wasn't exactly the type to attract a girl who wanted to fly planes and who had gotten into what he guessed had been a very competitive college program. She could have done a lot better than a loser like him.

That was then, though, and this was now. Of course, he guessed he still wasn't much of a catch - what sane woman would want a man who could barely call himself human anymore?

Blair said, "If we're going to play Twenty Questions, then I've got one, too."

"What?"

"What's being dead like?"

Good question. As far as he could tell, it hadn't been like anything. He shrugged. "Darkness. Sleep without the dreams."

It might have been his imagination, but it seemed as if she relaxed slightly. Had she been expecting something much worse? A natural reaction, he supposed. After all, if you'd lost pretty much everyone you cared about in a variety of gruesome ways, then probably you really didn't want to hear that what came after death was even worse than dying itself. No heaven, but no hell, either. And he was pretty sure if there were a hell, he would have gotten an express ticket to its deepest pit.

They rounded a curve, and she cried out, "Oh, shit!" even as her foot descended on the brake and the Jeep began to skid on the sandy road.

An overturned tanker truck lay across the highway like a beached whale. No way to get around it, either - here, the road cut through a narrow canyon, with little clearance between the asphalt and the hills on both sides. And what space there was to either side of the tanker truck had been blocked with more abandoned vehicles. No simple road accident, then. Someone had gone to a good deal of trouble to make sure this stretch of highway was impassable.

Somehow Blair managed to maintain control of the Jeep. They skidded to a stop a scant eighteen inches away from the wreck of the tanker truck. Smoke and sand swirled up from the road.

For a few seconds she sat very still, her fingers wrapped around the steering wheel so tightly Marcus could see the knuckles standing out white beneath her olive-tan skin. Then she said, "Well, isn't that special."

"Is there another way around?"

She shook her head. "Not really. The machines bombed the snot out of I-5, since it was the main north-south route through the state. If it were passable, I'd say we could backtrack and go down to Highway 138. But since that isn't an option, I guess we'll have to do this the old-fashioned way."

"Which is?" Marcus asked, but he thought he knew the answer.

A flashing smile, worthy of a toothpaste commercial. He wondered how she'd managed to keep her teeth looking so good even with the privations of the post–Judgment Day world.

"Hope you've got your walking shoes on," she said.

* * *

It wasn't too bad, she thought. In the world she'd lost, attempting a hike like this in August would have been positively suicidal. But now the clouds of nuclear winter blocked the worst of the summer sun, and the cool breeze on her face felt almost pleasant.

They'd left the Jeep behind after stripping it of anything remotely useful. Good thing the contingencies had been planned for, and they'd brought along rucksacks just in case something went wrong with the vehicle and they had to continue on foot. Not even four-wheel drive was enough to climb the steep canyon walls, but their feet proved once again that they were the most versatile mode of transportation out there. It had been a slog, but eventually she and Marcus had clambered up and around the wreck of the tanker truck and made it down the other side.

Rufus ran a few yards ahead, nose to the ground, tail wagging as if he'd just been granted the best birthday gift ever. Maybe he had, Blair thought. The dog loved to ride in the truck, but she guessed it was probably even more fun for him to travel territory he'd never seen before and take in a host of new smells and sounds.

Beside her, Marcus moved easily, the Mossberg propped against one shoulder. The Vulcan cannon he'd retrieved from the downed T-600 peeked out from the top of his rucksack.

She caught herself admiring the fine lines of his jaw and forced her gaze forward, even though there wasn't much to see. This stretch of highway looked like so many others she'd seen - dusty, full of potholes, and with the occasional wreck dotted here and there to break up the monotony. At least the road had begun to trend downward as they crossed a southern spur of the Tehachapis. The barricade had been set a few miles before Highway 58 crested; for a mile or two she'd wondered if they'd be able to make the journey all the way to northwest corner of the Mojave where the cache was supposedly located. Now, though, they were able to pick up their pace once they didn't have to slog uphill.

The sun had already begun to slip westward, however, and Blair gave it an uneasy glance over her shoulder. She'd envisioned this as a simple day trip - or as simple as any expedition got nowadays. While they had enough food to last them for probably half a week if they were careful, they hadn't brought much along in terms of sleeping gear. Out of habit she'd stowed a thin army blanket in her rucksack, but she didn't know if Marcus had done the same.

_Guess you'll just have to snuggle together_, a traitorous part of her mind thought, and a memory so vivid it was almost tactile washed over her - the feel of Marcus' well-muscled shoulder beneath her cheek, the strong beat of his heart lulling her to sleep. Would a repeat of that night outside the race track be so terrible?

She wasn't sure if she wanted to answer that question. Wasn't her life complicated enough already? Did she really need to throw a possible relationship with a cyborg into the mix?

"Town," said Marcus.

With a mental wrench she practically felt, Blair turned her thoughts away from her muddled personal life and focused on her surroundings. The hills around them for the last few miles had been dotted with the white shapes of wind turbines; they still turned lazily in the wind, although any power they generated had to be wasted, with the electric companies' infrastructure smashed to pieces by Skynet. Below them, she saw the sprawl of a small to mid-sized town.

Almost as one, she and Marcus brought their weapons to the ready.

"Any signs of life?" she asked.

He shook his head. "Don't think so. Doesn't mean people couldn't still be hiding, but - "

"But not likely," she finished. Once, people had gathered together in cities and towns, seeking safety in numbers. But the very qualities that had made human communities attractive turned them into hunting grounds for the Terminators. Better to disappear into the open spaces of the world, to scatter and spread out so the machines would have a harder time tracking their victims. She added, "It's probably picked over, but we might as well see if there's anything we can salvage. A vehicle would be great."

Marcus lifted an eyebrow, and for a second she thought he might mock her for trying to avoid a walking tour of the Mojave. Then he shrugged. "Doubt there's anything left, but you never know."

The slope beneath their feet gradually grew more gentle. Rufus continued on point, but there was nothing much to see. The area surrounding the town seemed to be comprised of low rolling hills or flat fields that now only produced acres of dry grass. But then a sign caught her eye, and Blair sucked in her breath. It couldn't be that easy -

"We're taking the next exit," she told Marcus, and pointed. "Look."

His eyes followed the sweep of her outstretched arm, to the prosaic green and white California highway sign. It was anything but ordinary to her, however. Those five words were enough to get her heart racing.

_Tehachapi Municipal Airport — Next Exit._

* * *

She could have been a kid on Christmas morning. Or at least the way he imagined a child might have acted on Christmas Day - his own holidays had been pretty bleak affairs. His father hadn't been all that great about sending the support checks, especially any time close to special events.

But now Blair's eyes shone as she looked around the hangar at the aircraft it still contained. Maybe the people here in Tehachapi who'd survived Judgment Day hadn't known how to fly a small plane. He guessed at least a few of them must have - it was pretty obvious the hangar had some large gaps where planes must have been parked once. There were still several left, though, and they looked to be in pretty decent shape.

Blair paused at a single-engine job, painted white with a blue stripe down the side. "I don't believe it."

"Believe what?"

She patted one of the plane's wheels. "Piper Cherokee. I learned to fly on an older model of one of these."

"You think it still works?"

"Don't see why not." She stepped away from him and circled the plane, obviously checking it for any outward signs of disrepair. "She's a bit dusty, but she looks in good shape overall."

"You really think it would be safe? The H-Ks - "

"Yeah, I know - it's not an A-10. Pipers are a bit short in the weapons department. But we haven't heard a peep out of Skynet in over a week, and besides, I can fly this sucker low and avoid the radar. Even the machines have a hard time tracking you when you're just skimming the hilltops."

He supposed she was right, but he didn't like it much. Then again, some of his trepidation could have been caused by the fact that the first time he'd seen Blair, she'd just had her precious A-10 shot out of the sky.

A direct protest wouldn't do much good, but that didn't mean he couldn't point out the fallacies in her plan. "What about fuel?"

"The airport must have had a pumping station," she replied, without batting an eye. "It's probably located between these two hangars."

"And you think there's any fuel left after all these years?"

Her grin mocked him. "Aren't you Negative Nancy all of a sudden? Anyway, the only people who could've used that fuel were the ones who took the other planes from the hangar. There's most likely some left. Also, have you ever had to get gas out of a submersible pump in the tank itself?"

He shook his head. Over the years he'd done his share of siphoning gas, but that was one trick he and his brother had never learned.

"It's not easy, but it's the only way they could have gotten the gas out after the power died. So I'm betting we'll find enough to fill our tanks. Come on."

She led him out a side door, into a wide space between the two hangars. Rufus followed them and immediately began nosing along the perimeter of the building. Probably smelled rats…or worse.

The gas pumps were located out there, just as Blair had guessed. She walked up to one, lifted the nozzle, and gave an experimental squeeze on its handle. Nothing came out, and she gave a shrug. "I figured it wouldn't be that easy, but it never hurts to try." She replaced the nozzle in its cradle and then placed her hands on her hips as she surveyed the open asphalt-paved area.

Marcus didn't like it out there. It felt too exposed, even though they hadn't seen any living creatures since they got into Tehachapi except crows and the slinking shape of what might have been a coyote.

"Got it," she said, and walked a few yards away to a metal plate set into the asphalt. It probably once had a latch and some sort of lock, but from the looks of the metal bits that remained, Marcus guessed someone had blasted latch and lock into oblivion with a shotgun at close range.

"Don't think we were the first ones to try this," he commented, as she grasped what was left of the latch and hauled the metal plate upward.

"And they made it that much easier for us to get in here," she pointed out. The upper half of her body temporarily disappeared as she leaned inside the compartment. Then she reemerged, still with that grin pulling at her mouth.

"Christmas come early?" he asked.

"Pretty much. Looks like whoever blasted the lock was in a hurry. They left their siphoning equipment still hooked up. All we have to is get a couple of gas cans."

"How much fuel does the Piper take?"

Blair got to her feet and dusted at the seat of her cargo pants. Marcus tried not to think about what that shapely ass of hers would feel like pushed up against his hands.

"A little less than fifty gallons."

"That's a lot of gas cans."

"Then we'd better start looking."

The storage area behind the hangar had been plundered, and so had the equipment lockers in both buildings. However, Blair thought to take a look inside the security office, and there they found two five-gallon gas cans. Great.

"That's a lot of trips," he pointed out.

"We'll fill just one at first. We need to see if that bird even still runs." She slanted a look at him from underneath a loose tendril of wavy hair. "Is the cyborg superman bitching about carrying a few cans of gas?"

He knew she meant the remark in jest, but still his spine stiffened at the word "cyborg." So that was how she thought of him. Well, at least it helped clear up any lingering uncertainty over that point.

"No, ma'am," he replied, and picked up both cans.

She protested at once. "Let me take one of those."

He shrugged away from her. "It's fine. Might as well put all this specialized equipment to use."

"Marcus - "

"Don't worry about it. You should get over to your plane and get started."

Her mouth opened, probably to utter another objection, but then she stopped, staring up into his face. He had no idea what she saw there, but apparently she didn't much like it. She paused, then said, "You're probably right."

Without another word she turned and went back into the hangar, calling Rufus to her as she went.

Marcus cursed under his breath, then headed out to the fuel tanks.

* * *

_Stupid_, Blair thought. _Stupid, stupid,_ stupid.

What the hell had she been thinking with that cyborg remark? It had wounded him, she could tell. A flicker had gone through those clear blue eyes, and his lips had tightened. And she hadn't meant anything by it. Just Blair shooting her mouth off, as usual. Her mother had said on more than one occasion that she didn't have a very good self-edit button. This definitely wasn't the first time her lack of discretion had gotten her in trouble.

But going to Marcus and explaining that she'd just been kidding around seemed out of the question. Most likely she'd just muddle things even further. Better to let it slide and try to show him from here on out that of course she thought of him as a man like any other. No, scratch that. He wasn't like any other man she'd ever known, and she preferred him that way.

With a sigh, she opened the pilot's door of the Piper and climbed in. Rufus let out a little whine and cocked his head as he stared up at her.

"Not yet, Rufus," she said. "First we have to see if this bird will even fly."

Whoever had owned the little four-seater had dropped some cash on the options. They'd beefed up the avionics with extra sensors, most of which wouldn't do them much good these days, since there were no control towers to broadcast the info those sensors used to receive. To her surprise, it looked as if the battery had held some power; the electronics came on as she flicked a few switches. Of course the fuel gauge was hovering near empty.

She heard Marcus call out to her. "Ready for some juice?"

"Ready!" she responded.

A clank as he tipped the fuel can into the tank. She heard him step away when he was done, and she touched the throttle cautiously, not sure that it would actually catch. But the little four-cylinder roared into life almost once, and she felt the plane begin to vibrate beneath her.

That was all she needed to know. She shut everything off and climbed back out of the plane. Despite that crack about Marcus' cyborg muscles, she wasn't about to make him finish the fueling on his own.

Luckily he remained silent throughout the procedure, not even bothering to argue when she picked up one of the cans as he leaned down to retrieve it.

"Your back," was all he said.

Rufus watched them go back and forth in some puzzlement, but he found a spot midway between the plane and the fuel tanks where he could watch them come and go. At last they were done, and they stowed the empty gas cans in the storage compartment along with the items they had salvaged from the Jeep.

"What's the range on this thing?" Marcus asked, after he buckled himself into the co-pilot's seat and Rufus had plopped down on the passenger seat directly behind Blair.

"About five hundred miles," Blair replied. "Plenty to get us where we're going and back. We'll be able to go home in style."

He shook his head but didn't say anything. From the grim set of his mouth, she could tell he didn't think much of their chances for an uneventful recon flight.

Well, to be perfectly honest, she didn't know how much she thought of them, either, but borrowing trouble wasn't going to help the situation any. For now it was enough to hear the little Piper's engine come back to life, and to feel the bumpy tarmac under the wheels as she taxied out to the runway.

Over the years it had cracked and pitted, and weeds now grew out of the fissures. Not the best conditions, for a takeoff, but she'd piloted planes in and out of much worse during her time with the Resistance.

The plane sailed into the air as if it had just been waiting for the moment when it could become a creature of the skies once again. Tehachapi stretched beneath them, another piece of America gone forever, its restaurants and gas station and one movie theater dead as every other town like it. Then they were past the modest sprawl of its housing tracts and strip malls, and flying over open fields.

As promised, Blair kept their altitude as low as she dared. She didn't know the terrain, and around here it was still hilly enough that she had to maintain some safe distance from the ground. After about fifteen minutes of flying, however, they passed the last of the foothills, and the desert floor stretched out below them.

Highway 58 was a thin ribbon helping to guide their way, dusty gray against the parched yellows and tans of the desert itself. She dropped lower, following the highway but staying a few miles north of it.

"The desert rat said it was somewhere between Barstow and 395," she said. "Unfortunately, that's a big bag of nowhere."

Marcus nodded but didn't reply. It made sense that he would be the one to scan the desert for anything unusual, but Blair couldn't help thinking he seemed glad to have a reason to avoid looking at her.

_This trip is just turning into more and more fun_, she reflected.

A few more minutes passed, and then she said, "That must be 395."

It was a larger road bisecting the east-west line of Highway 58. Wrecked cars gleamed dully in the faint-hearted sunlight. Nothing to see there that she hadn't seen a hundred times before, but at least it meant they were getting closer to their goal.

Even Marcus couldn't argue the fact that they'd covered in barely thirty minutes ground that would have taken hours for them to traverse. The plane was in great shape; clearly it must have been some rich man's toy. Probably the only reason it had been left behind was its size and load capacity. People looking to evacuate would've gone for the six-seaters or private jets.

"What's that?" he said suddenly, and pointed out the window.

Blair dropped a little lower. Something glittered against the sand colors of the desert landscape, something that definitely wasn't abandoned cars or crashed planes. As they approached, the objects came into sharper focus: acre after acre of solar panels, all angled to collect what they could from the dimmer sun of the post-Judgment Day world.

"I'm surprised Skynet hasn't shot the shit out of that," Marcus said.

"Skynet always focused on the cities. Why blow up a solar farm when the energy it's collecting isn't going anywhere? It's not logical."

"I'd say that energy is going somewhere," he replied. "Looks like we're about to have company."

Blair saw them a second later: the sleek shapes of two F-15s rising from somewhere on the desert floor. Her shock gave way to envy as she stared at those beautiful birds. What she wouldn't give to be behind the controls of one of them -

The radio crackled to life. "Unidentified craft, you are entering restricted air space. State your name and business."

Marcus threw her a doubtful look, but she saw no reason to lie. In this future the machines had created, it was a lot easier to tell friend from foe. Humans weren't the enemy. Not anymore.

She picked up the radio handset. "This is Blair Williams, pilot for the Resistance. I'm here on orders from John Connor, performing recon. And you are?"

"Someone with much bigger guns than you. You will land at 35 degrees north, 117 degrees west. Someone will meet you there."

With that the pair of F-15s dropped back, watching to see what they would do.

"Friendly, aren't they?" she remarked. "Looks like they're getting the welcome wagon out for us."

Marcus didn't say anything, but merely gave a quick, tense nod before resuming his watch out the window.

Well, what was she supposed to do? They could blow her out of the sky without even breaking a sweat. Better to do what they said and see what happened next.

She logged the coordinates and descended slowly to a small airfield about a hundred yards from the northernmost bank of solar panels. As far as she could tell, there was nothing else out here except those acres of mirrors, but the presence of the F-15s signaled that there had to be something else going on. You couldn't maintain that sort of force without backup equipment and personnel.

This runway was much better maintained than the one back in Tehachapi. They landed with hardly a bump, then coasted to a stop.

"I'm guessing it would be smart to leave the artillery behind," she said, just as Marcus began to reach for the Mossberg.

For a second he stiffened, and then he gave a studiedly casual shrug. "If you say so."

These days she would rather have gone out naked than without a sidearm, but she also knew that anyone who could get a couple of Eagles into the air also probably had plenty of lesser firepower. She hadn't survived this long just to get killed by some trigger-happy flyboys.

Even as she slid out of the pilot's seat, she could see a trio of men approaching the plane. Marcus came to stand next to her as they grew closer, and she was glad of that. Despite the tension between them, she knew he had her back, no matter what happened.

Two of the strangers were soldiers, dressed in camo and with M-16s held at the ready in their hands. The one in the center was a tall black man wearing, of all things a lab coat. He stopped a few feet away from them and then smiled.

"Welcome to Elysium," he said. "My name is Daniel Dyson."


	4. Chapter 4

Well, better late than never! Sorry it took me awhile to update this - summer tends to be my slow writing season, since it's my busiest time at work (and also because heat fries my brain, unfortunately). Thank you to everyone for your wonderful reviews - it's knowing that people are waiting for the next installment that inspires me to drag my lazy ass to the computer and write.

* * *

Four

The name had meant nothing to Marcus, but he guessed Blair must know something of who this Daniel Dyson was - he'd seen the quick, startled flicker of her eyes as the stranger introduced himself. Still, she'd managed to maintain an expression of polite interest, even as she'd responded with hers and Marcus' names and the reason why they were out flying around the northern Mojave.

That is, she'd given their mission to Dyson as simple recon, and he seemed to have swallowed the explanation. Telling their new host that they'd been hoping to scam a few spare airplanes and any other items that weren't nailed down probably wasn't the greatest idea, and obviously Blair had thought the same thing.

Apparently Dyson hadn't considered them to be much of a threat, because he'd decided to give them a guided tour of Elysium.

"Otherwise known as SEGS three through eight," Dyson said. "Of course, we've expanded considerably since this facility was first constructed."

That was an understatement. Elysium was like an iceberg - only a very small fraction was visible aboveground. The banks of solar panels had remained more or less intact, as had the small and not very impressive control station. But underground was a labyrinth of corridors lit by glaring fluorescent fixtures, with official-looking brown-painted doors at regular intervals. The floor underfoot was off-white vinyl, the walls a not very pleasant pale green. The whole place reminded Marcus a little too much of the prison facility where he'd spent his last days. He didn't like it.

He also didn't like the way some of the men they passed were staring at Blair. Sure, she was a very stare-able woman, but these guys looked at her the way a starving man might ogle a particularly prime piece of steak. He should know, since that was about how he'd felt when he was handed his last meal, a choice cut of rib eye.

The crowd here seemed to be a mixture of scientific and military personnel. The men in uniforms outnumbered the lab coat–wearing contingent about two to one. Marcus only glimpsed two or three women among them, and they weren't exactly the types to be winning any beauty contests.

"SEGS?" Blair asked. If she had noticed the way she'd become the focus of some unpleasant attention, she wasn't giving any hint of it in her expression or her posture.

At least Dyson didn't seem to be paying any particular attention to Blair beyond giving her the rundown. "Solar energy generating systems. Originally there were nine, all linked on the same grid. The one here at Kramer Junction is the last surviving one, and, as you can see, it's been put to good use."

"You did all this after Judgment Day?" She didn't bother to hide the surprise in her voice.

Dyson smiled. "No. Elysium had been taking shape for some years before that. Let's just say that there were certain…interests…who thought it a good idea to have a facility like this in place, one off the books, and one connected to an almost limitless power source. Of course, our megawatt output is down from its peak because of PJD weather conditions, but we still have more than enough."

More than enough? That was an understatement. Marcus thought of the miserable scraps of humanity that were left, the people who huddled in the dark, in basements, in canyons, in any blasted-out building that could still provide some shelter. They weren't walking around in clean clothes in pristine, white-lit facilities. Even the contingent at Connor's Resistance base had been scrawny and half-dirty and poorly clothed.

Something that felt close to anger began to grow in him then. Stupid, maybe - he couldn't fix the world, and he sure as hell hadn't been afire with righteous indignation over its inequities back in the days before the bombs dropped. No, back then he'd taken what he could get, and no regrets. But now the world worked under different rules, and people generally looked out for each other. That these scientists and soldiers had been sitting pretty here at Elysium all this time while the rest of the world rotted and died just rubbed him the wrong way.

"Nice setup," Marcus commented. "You ever think someone else might want hot showers and a safe place to sleep?"

Blair shot him a warning glance from beneath her lashes, but she remained silent.

"We couldn't take in the world," Dyson said. Surprisingly, he didn't look a bit annoyed at Marcus' question. "This facility was too important to risk over a few refugees."

"So what makes it so important?"

"All in good time." Dyson opened a door. "Why don't you take a seat? Something to drink? Water? Coffee?"

"Coffee?" Blair repeated in disbelieving tones. "You have real coffee?"

"Of course." Dyson glanced over at Marcus. "And you?"

At that point what he thought he could really use was a couple of bottles of Miller followed by a chaser of Jack Daniels, but Marcus guessed that even if the people at Elysium were hiding such riches in their pantries, such a request wouldn't go over too well. And a good kick of caffeine wouldn't be a bad second choice.

"Coffee sounds good," he allowed.

Dyson nodded and led them into the room, which was obviously a meeting space of some sort. A large oval table dominated the chamber, and the far wall was covered by the biggest screen Marcus had seen outside of a movie theater. Some kind of communications console was built into one end of the table; Dyson pushed a button, said, "Coffee service for three in meeting room twelve," and then turned back to his guests. "Go ahead and sit down."

Blair hesitated, then took a seat about midway down the table. Marcus sat down next to her, deliberately placing himself between her and Dyson, who remained standing. Marcus hadn't gotten any particularly weird vibes off the guy, but it never hurt to be careful. Rufus somehow managed to squeeze himself in between Marcus and Blair, nose on his paws. However, he kept his ears up and his head lifted. No way anyone was going to get something past Rufus if this situation turned ugly.

The door opened, and a soldier carrying a tray with a pot of coffee and three mugs stepped inside. No sexy secretaries at Elysium, apparently.

The coffee smelled amazing, though. He'd never been a connoisseur - a quick cup of joe from the local 7-Eleven if he needed to stay awake was about as serious as he'd ever gotten - but it did seem that Dyson & Co. had a direct line to the good stuff.

Blair took hers black, he noticed. No mucking around with cream and sugar for her. She held the cup beneath her nose and inhaled, her eyes shutting as she took in the rich scent of the freshly brewed liquid. Marcus watched the thick fringe of her lashes brush against her cheeks and wondered what it would be like to watch her eyes close that way as he moved his hands over her body.

He could feel himself stir, and realized that fantasizing about Blair while buried in the depths of a hidden military base probably wasn't the world's greatest idea. With a conscious effort, he forced his mind back to the coffee he held and matters of more immediate importance.

The coffee was uncomfortably hot, but Marcus forced himself to take a sip anyway. What was he afraid of, after all? If he burned his tongue, it would heal itself before he'd even finished the mug in front of him. And the drink was good - rich and dark and possessing none of the bitterness he'd always associated with coffee.

"So how d'you do it?" he asked. "Hidden stores of pre-War Folgers?"

Dyson smiled again, but this time Marcus thought he saw a hint of condescension in that smile. "Not exactly. We grow almost everything we consume - one quadrant of the facility is taken up exclusively by hydroponics."

Marcus' knowledge of hydroponics was pretty much limited to an acquaintance who'd grown his stash that way in a shed hidden on the back forty of his property. But the weed that had come out of Jeff's little lab had been better than anything you could get on the street, so Marcus could see how coffee grown that way might be just as good.

"So you're self-sustaining," Blair put in.

A nod. "We've had to be. We knew there would be a span of years where we couldn't rely on anyone but ourselves for our supplies. And we also knew the wait would be a lengthy one."

"Wait?" Blair repeated. "What were you waiting for?"

Dyson gave them another of those serene, almost Buddha-like smiles. "For John Connor to become the leader of the Resistance."

* * *

Blair supposed she should have been expecting something like this. After all, Daniel Dyson had been there when Sarah Connor made her abortive attempt on his father's life. Even if he hadn't heard every gory detail about why his father's work had to be stopped, he most likely would have gotten a filtered version of it later from his mother. Like John Connor, Daniel Dyson had some very personal knowledge of what Judgment Day meant.

Not that that knowledge had helped anyone to prevent the apocalypse, but - at least in Dyson's case - it had obviously assisted him in surviving the aftermath in style.

"So I'm assuming you know all about what went down the past few weeks," she said.

"Not all," Dyson replied, and he shot a swift appraising glance at Marcus before returning his attention to her. "We do know Skynet suffered a significant setback. And we know that Command was destroyed."

Something about the quick look Dyson had given Marcus sent a chill down her spine. How much did he know? Everyone at the Resistance base was aware of Marcus' cyborg status, even if they didn't have all the particulars. If Dyson somehow had managed to place his own agents in the Resistance forces, then of course he'd be privy to whatever knowledge they possessed. He'd know that Marcus wasn't quite all he seemed.

She couldn't let Dyson see her rattled. With an effort she kept her gaze fixed on the scientist and away from Marcus. "And with Command gone, John is in charge."

"That was what we assumed, but it's good to have it corroborated by someone in his circle."

Was she in Connor's circle? She supposed so, although she'd never really thought of it that way. She and Barnes and Connor and a few others had become part of a special corps, the ones who always managed to come back. Luck more than anything, but she wasn't about to argue with it.

"So you know John was pretty badly wounded," she went on. "He hasn't been in much of a position to command anything except the people under his immediate charge."

"But he will command, and soon."

She shrugged. "That seems to be the general consensus. Who's going to argue with a prophecy?"

"Is it really a prophecy when someone from the future stated it as fact?"

Good question. Ever since she'd joined the Resistance, she'd heard the rumors that circulated through its ranks. One day a man named John Connor would lead them. One day he'd find a way to bring down Skynet once and for all. There were darker, murkier whispers as well - that he would gain access to some sort of time travel equipment, that his father was a man who'd been born later than his own son.

Blair had never known exactly how much to believe until she'd met John and Kate Connor. Neither one of them had attempted to hide the truth. Still, she'd had a hard time swallowing all the talk about time travel until she met Kyle Reese, John's father. His father, who at present was approximately half his son's age.

"You may have a point," she allowed. "Anyway, people like to have something they can believe in. And they trust John Connor."

"That's what we wanted to hear." Dyson paused and took a sip of his own coffee. "I have to say that I'm eager to meet him - it's been a long time since we last saw each other."

"You were just a kid, right?"

He nodded. "And John not much more."

She tried to imagine either Dyson or Connor as a young boy, failed miserably, and decided it was best to forge ahead. "I guess this is fortuitous, then. You've just been sitting here, waiting for the right moment, and we're in dire need of a resupply after our last engagement with Skynet."

Beside her, Marcus stirred, then repeated what he'd said to her back at the Tehachapi airport. "Sounds like Christmas is coming early this year."

Dyson's only response was a tight-lipped smile. Blair had the distinct impression that he didn't much care for Marcus. Convenient, since she could practically feel the antagonistic vibes radiating off her travel companion. She had no idea whether it was just dueling testosterone or something else, but she did know getting Elysium to throw its resources in behind the Resistance was of paramount importance, and this was definitely not the time to indulge in dick-waving.

If Dyson had an agenda beyond the one he'd already stated, Blair couldn't begin to guess what it might be. She was no politician. Since trying to be coy would probably end in disaster, she decided the direct approach was best. If her honesty bit in her in the ass later on, she'd deal with the consequences then.

"So what's the next step?" she asked. "Should I contact John and let him know he can expect backup shortly?"

Dyson's smile faltered a bit. "A few days ago, I would have said yes. However - " He hesitated, then darted another of those fleeting, wary glances at Marcus before returning his attention to her. "Some complications have arisen."

Marcus jumped on that like a dog on a bone. "Complications?"

The scientist kept his gaze fixed on Blair. She tried to maintain a pleasantly neutral expression, even though a thin knot of tension had begun to work itself into the base of her neck. Part of her just wanted to get up from the table, grab Marcus and Rufus, and get the hell out of there. But they needed those planes. And more ammunition. And guns, and food, and clothing, and a depressingly long list of supplies that were getting harder and harder to come by.

Dyson said, "Maybe you and I should continue this discussion in private."

Beside her, Marcus bristled, and Blair felt rather than saw Rufus go tense. It wouldn't take much to set him off at the rate they were going.

"There isn't anything you need to say that can't be said in front of Marcus," she replied coolly, ignoring the bayonet-sharp glare her companion shot in Dyson's direction. "John Connor sent us out as a team. He trusts him. And if John trusts Marcus, then so should you."

"It's not a question of whom I trust," Dyson said. The veneer of genial host slipped a bit, and for a few seconds Blair could see the strain in his jaw, the shadows under his eyes. He was a good-looking man, she realized suddenly, despite the tension in his face. "But some of the leadership here at Elysium has doubts about allying us with someone who would allow a known cyborg and traitor to remain a part of his organization."

A metallic scrape as Marcus shoved his chair away from the table and stood. "I'm not a traitor." The one hand Blair could see knotted into a fist at his side.

Oh, hell. For a fleeting second she wished the mad scientists at Skynet had dialed back Marcus' testosterone levels while they were in there replacing his innards with a metal skeleton and cybernetic relays. But she didn't have time for useless might-have-beens - she needed to salvage the situation, and fast.

On instinct she reached out and took Marcus' hand in hers, then gave one downward tug. At first he resisted, but then she felt his fingers tighten against her own, and he dropped back into his chair.

Keeping her hand still wrapped around his, she lifted her chin and stared directly into Dyson's dark eyes. "I think you know as well as I do that John Connor would never keep someone around who he considered to be a traitor. Marcus saved John's life. If we've accepted him, then so should you."

"Again, I'm not the one questioning John Connor's judgment." Dyson made a brief, frustrated motion with one hand and then moved away from the table. With that same hand he reached out and touched a switch on the wall. "But maybe when you see what's at stake, you'll understand why Elysium can't afford to take any chances."

The wall across from them began to move. Actually, Blair realized, it wasn't a true wall at all, but some sort of screen that blocked a huge window. And that window looked down into a cavernous space so large that at first she thought it couldn't be real, that it had to be some sort of computer-generated image like something out of one of the special-effects extravaganzas her father had always loved.

Harsh lights glared from somewhere overhead, although she couldn't see their source. On the floor of the bunker - or whatever it was - she saw ranks of fighter planes and tanks, Humvees and heavy-duty trucks. With tight-throated longing she spotted a phalanx of A-10s, and then a group of sleek F-22s. Marcus had been right. It really was Christmas in August. With equipment like this, they'd have a fighting chance against Skynet, especially now that its main base in San Francisco had been destroyed.

Blair hadn't even realized she'd stood until she felt Marcus' hand slip from hers. She stepped away from the table and went to stand by the window, and could barely keep herself from pressing her nose against the glass, like a kid staring into a candy store.

When she spoke, she was surprised to hear her voice raw and rusty, tight with pent-up frustration, mixed with envy and a generous helping of flat-out longing. "All this time," she said. "All this time you had all this at your fingertips, and you didn't do a goddamn thing."

To her satisfaction, she saw Dyson flinch. "Blair, I - "

Then Marcus came to stand next to her. Although he didn't reach out to take her hand, she found his presence immediately reassuring. No matter what tensions lay between them, she knew he would do whatever it took to protect her.

Not, she told herself at once, that she was in need of protection. After all, Dyson hadn't made any threatening moves. Even if he had, she sort of doubted he had the sort of combat training she did. She probably could have taken him if necessary. Still, knowing that Marcus stood next to her, ready to act, made her feel a bit more in control of the situation.

He lifted an eyebrow and turned a scorching look on Dyson. "And you're calling me a traitor? I'm not the one sitting on a stockpile and letting the rest of the world die."

Blair could have sworn the anguish in the scientist's face was genuine. "It was not a decision made lightly, I assure you. But we simply couldn't risk discovery, not when what we had was so important."

"Not very good at it, though, are you?" Marcus returned. "When you can't even keep stuff hidden from some desert rat - "

Dyson cut in at once. "One of our men, actually. We decided the time was right for Connor to hear about our installation."

"But you've since changed your mind?" Blair asked. She didn't bother to keep the disbelief from her voice.

Again Dyson hesitated. He kept his gaze fixed on her, almost as if he refused to acknowledge Marcus' presence any further. "Perhaps if we spoke in private - "

"Whatever you have to say to me, you can say in front of Marcus," she said. Then she did feel his fingers touch hers, a brief pressure so subtle she wasn't sure she hadn't imagined it.

"Admirable," Dyson replied. "But I'm afraid I must insist."

Blair cast a sideways glance up at Marcus. His jaw was set, his mouth tight, but he gave an almost imperceptible nod.

"Should I wait outside?" he asked.

Dyson shook his head. "Not necessary. There's a smaller meeting room just through that door. We'll use that." He gestured toward a doorway in the wall immediately behind him.

Since Marcus wasn't offering any more protests - and because she was curious as to what Dyson had to say to her - Blair opened the door and let herself into the room beyond. As advertised, it was a smallish meeting room with a table that could accommodate six people at most. No windows here, although one wall boasted a fairly impressive flat-screen monitor. As Dyson closed the door behind him, she caught a glimpse of Marcus standing where she had left him, his arms crossed. Rufus had taken up a position at his feet. Marcus might have stopped arguing, but he looked far from happy.

"How well do you know him?" Dyson asked, almost as soon as the door had closed itself, driven by a gas-powered spring.

Blair didn't bother to ask who the scientist was referring to. How to respond, though? She really couldn't see herself telling Dyson about the night she'd spent in Marcus' arms huddled against the cold, and neither did she want to go into a lengthy description of the kiss he'd given her when he'd thought he was about to sacrifice himself to save John's life. But beyond those moments, how much did she really have? A few brief exchanges, the hours they'd spent together traveling here. He hadn't exactly been an upstanding member of society back in the day. He could be abrupt. His sense of humor was a bit skewed. A lot of people back at the base didn't even think he was human.

And yet she knew she trusted him implicitly.

"How well do we know anyone?" she countered.

"_Touché_. But I didn't bring you in here to discuss philosophy, Blair. I need to know whether we can progress any further with this, or whether I'll have to send you home with as much spare food and ammo as your Piper can carry - but that's all."

Even that would be better than nothing, but a few boxes of bullets and some freeze-dried rations weren't going to win the war against Skynet.

She tried not to think of how much was riding on this as she replied, "He ripped out the slave circuit, Dyson. Marcus may still have a machine endoskeleton and some enhanced biological functions, but his mind is as human as yours or mine. He chose to fight on our side. What he did was an utter rejection of Skynet. I can't think of how much more you need to prove that he's not a pawn of the machines."

For a moment Dyson said nothing, but only regarded her thoughtfully. It was so quiet that she thought she could hear the air hissing through the vents in the ceiling. Funny how the place didn't smell stale at all despite being at least a quarter-mile underground. Maybe they used the chlorophyll from the hydroponic gardens to freshen the oxygen mix.

So many questions she wanted to ask - how the Elysium project had gotten its start, who had funded it, and how no one had apparently paid any attention to all the materiel being funneled here - but she knew right now it wasn't her turn to ask anything. No, she had to stand here and defend Marcus to someone who didn't seem too disposed to think kindly of him.

She wondered then if this little interview was as private as it seemed. The flat screen on the wall would make a great one-way mirror. Maybe a silent tribunal watched her from the other side of that wall, judging her every word.

_Or maybe too many years of fighting the machines has made you totally paranoid_, she thought. _Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but don't let yourself get spooked now._

Finally Dyson spoke. "And John Connor believes the same thing."

"I've already told you that. Several times. So either you're going to believe me, or you're not. And if you're not, then give me my case of Spam and let me get the hell out of here. I've got better things to do with my time than stand here and play character witness all day."

To her surprise, Dyson actually laughed. "We could probably do a little better than Spam." Then his expression sobered. "We're all fighting for the same thing, Blair."

Freedom from the machines. But what place would Marcus have in a world free of Skynet? Would the people around him finally be able to accept him as a man, and not some science experiment that had outlived its usefulness?

"I know that," she said, then folded her arms and stared up into Dyson's dark eyes. "And I also know that if you want to win, you'd do a lot worse than to have Marcus Wright fighting on your side."

* * *

The door opened, and Blair and Dyson re-emerged into the larger conference room. Marcus set down his mug of coffee, which by now tasted flat and lukewarm. He couldn't tell much from either Dyson's or Blair's expressions - they both looked calm and cool. Whatever had been going on behind that closed door, it apparently hadn't been a shouting match.

Blair spoke first. "Dyson is going to take us to meet Elysium's command now. Try to keep your foot out of your mouth."

"As long as you don't shove it there," he answered, but he had to repress a grin. Obviously Blair had gotten to Dyson somehow. He could ignore a few jibes if it meant going back to John Connor with a whole squadron of shiny new toys.

"I'll do my best." A quick little smile then, a close-lipped purse that somehow managed to show off the fullness of her mouth.

He couldn't allow himself to be distracted by that mouth and everything it promised. Instead, he said to Dyson, "Changed your mind?"

"It was never my mind that needed to be changed," Dyson said cryptically. "This way."

The scientist led them out of the conference room and back to the elevator, which took them downward at least five more levels. As Rufus trotted along at his heels, Marcus wondered how deep the Elysium installation actually ran, and was impressed despite himself.

When they emerged from the elevator, four soldiers wearing desert camo and wearing red berets met them in the hallway. Maybe the men were simply some sort of honor guard, but Marcus had the impression they wouldn't hesitate to empty one of those M-16s into him if he even looked at them cross-eyed. Not that he planned to. Every minute he spent with Blair convinced him that he wanted to go on living.

The corridor terminated in a set of heavy steel double doors. One of the soldiers stepped forward and pressed his thumb against the biometric pad, then entered a series of numbers. The doors slid back into the walls, revealing another hallway, although a much shorter one this time. The lighting down here was dimmer than it had been on the upper levels, and the floor beneath his feet was smooth rock, not institutional linoleum. Maybe Elysium's command maintained its headquarters on the bottom level of the installation as a way to guard against attack from the surface.

Again the soldier moved to enter a code at the single door at the end of the hallway. This one opened normally, and Marcus followed Dyson into a largish room dominated by a series of flat screens and an impressive amount of blinking electronic gadgetry. Blair stayed at his side, her left hand hovering near his right, even though she didn't actually reach out to take it. Rufus remained a faithful shadow a scant foot behind him.

Marcus didn't recognize most of the equipment, but that didn't really matter. The place screamed "war room" even if you didn't know what most of the stuff was for. Same went for the four men seated at the table in the center of the room. They were all in uniform - two Army, one Air Force, and one Marine, as far as he could tell - but even without all the brass and ribbons he would have known they were career military. No one who hadn't spent a few decades in the armed services ever managed to achieve that particular poker-up-the-ass posture.

They watched in stiff silence as Dyson and his two guests approached. Frowns deepened as they seemed to notice Rufus. Luckily, Dyson spoke first. "Sirs, Blair Williams and Marcus Wright."

Marcus wasn't sure what they expected him to do. Salute? Bow? The hell with that. He stood where he was, arms held loosely at his sides.

Luckily, Blair had a better sense of protocol than he did. She snapped a smart salute, then said, "Lieutenant Blair Williams, pilot, Tech-Com PS32187, sirs."

"At ease, Lieutenant," said one of the men, the one wearing the Air Force uniform. "Report on the condition of John Connor."

Chin still up, Blair replied, "Sir, John Connor is well and recovering from open-heart surgery. Estimated time to return to full duty is approximately six weeks. The local Resistance has relocated to a secure base and has experienced no further attacks from Skynet or its agents."

"Six weeks?" inquired one of the other brass. He wore an Army uniform whose left breast carried enough ribbons that Marcus was surprised it didn't implode somehow from all the weight. "Why so long, Lieutenant?"

"Sir, it was open-heart surgery." Just the faintest hint of a contemptuous glance from beneath the long lashes, one that came and went so fast Marcus wasn't sure it hadn't been a trick of the room's dim lighting. "Of course, that's the doctors' estimate of the time required for him to return to duty. Knowing John Connor, it will probably be much sooner. Sir."

The general who had just questioned her gave a cold-eyed nod, then turned and began a low-voiced discussion with the other men at the table. Marcus looked down at Blair and raised an eyebrow. She responded with a shrug, one small enough not to invite attention from the honchos.

"And is it your opinion that John Connor will be able to resume the fight within that timeframe?" the same general asked.

"I'm not a doctor, sir. But I do know that if Skynet attacked tonight, John would be organizing the defense, even if he had to do it from his bed."

Another _sotto voce_ convo, this time accompanied by a few emphatic hand gestures. Marcus couldn't quite tell what was going on, but it looked to him like the Air Force and Marine generals opposed whatever the Army leaders wanted. Great. He had a feeling this might go on for some time.

But then the dim lighting took on a red tint as hazard lights above the doors began to flash. The screens, which appeared to show scenes from around the installation as well as the surrounding desert, flared with sudden fire. What the hell -

A technician turned away from his monitoring station, his face pale even under the flashing red lights. "Sirs! We're under attack!"


	5. Chapter 5

I'm back! Millions of apologies for how long it took me to update, but, as it says in my profile, if I go MIA for an extended period it's usually because I'm off working on my original fiction. This time it paid off - I'm happy to report that an e-publisher accepted a contemporary romance I wrote, and it's going to be published in April. But since I'm between projects on that front, I thought I should come back to my Terminator fanfic (and seeing Sam Worthington in Avatar didn't hurt, either). I promise it won't take me as long to update next time - I already have the next chapter roughed out. Thank you for your patience!

* * *

Five

Almost as one, the generals turned away from Marcus and Blair and began issuing terse orders. Blair could tell they must have drilled for this eventuality - despite the tension in the room, so thick she could practically taste it, everyone on duty moved like gears in a precision machine.

"Reinforcements to the north perimeter," said the older of the two Army leaders. "What are we looking at?"

A voice crackled from one of the speakers. "Three HK tanks, approximately two dozen T-500s."

The Air Force general leaned into one of the communications units. "Send Ghost Squadron to the north perimeter to support the ground troops. Any sign of aerial assault?"

"Negative, sir. Bombardment is mainly from the tanks. The T-500s went after our picket troops."

"Understood." The Air Force commander turned away from the comm unit and rose from his seat. He frowned as he regarded Blair, a frown that only deepened as he shifted his gaze to Marcus. "Twenty years," he said.

Blair shot the general a puzzled glance. "Sir?"

"Twenty years this installation has been in existence, and yet this is the first time we've been attacked - an attack that just happened to coincide with your arrival here."

Although the elder Army commander continued to bark orders into a microphone, the other two men also turned frosty stares on their visitors. Blair could feel the tension in her shoulders building again, unease a cold finger tracing its way down her spine.

She knew better than to let any of her disquiet show on her face. "Just what are you trying to say? Sirs."

Next to her, Marcus shifted. Rufus let out a low growl, one she felt rather than heard. She guessed none of the men facing her would notice it over the general hubbub in the war room.

"They think we led the Terminators here," Marcus said. His tone was almost casual, but even in the room's dim, reddish light Blair saw a line appear between his brows as he scowled.

"That's ridiculous," she snapped, then stared up into the Air Force general's cold eyes. In normal light they were probably a pale blue or gray; here, under the flashing red hazard bulbs, they appeared blood-colored, like a lab rat's. "Why the hell would we do something so stupid? The Resistance needs every available resource."

"I'm not saying it was intentional," he said. His gaze slid briefly to Marcus, belying his words. "But through clumsiness, or - "

"Blair's not clumsy," Marcus cut in. He took a step toward the older man, then stopped, as if he'd suddenly realized that threatening one of the base's leaders in the heart of his fortress wasn't such a great idea. "She's been out on the front lines for years, fighting Skynet. I'm guessing she knows just a little more about evading Terminators than your own troops do."

From behind the Air Force general's epaulet-topped shoulder, Blair saw a bank of screens flare with light. An excited voice came over the speakers.

"Got 'em! Bombardment successful. I repeat. Bombardment successful."

The general shot another gimlet stare in Marcus' direction before he stepped back over to the microphone. "Status."

"Tanks destroyed, sir. Ghost Squadron now assisting in mop-up operations. Estimate perimeter will be locked down in approximately five minutes."

"Good job, lieutenant."

As the general turned away from the communications console, Marcus spoke. "Well, everything seems to be all better now."

In concert, all four generals frowned at him. If Blair hadn't known they probably had better things to do with their time, she would have thought they got together on a regular basis to practice synchronized scowling.

She hastened to say, "What Marcus means is that there doesn't seem to be any further immediate threat. My guess is that this was a unit operating independently from Skynet. They don't have to be getting orders from a central controller to still be a danger."

"We're well aware of that, lieutenant," the Marine general snapped, speaking for the first time. "It still doesn't explain how they could have found us after so many years."

Jesus, did they need her to draw them a diagram? She began to see why John always looked as if he wanted to kick puppies after having a convo with Command. These men were relics of a system that was no longer relevant. She'd learned early on that survival was predicated on adaptability. Sheltered here at Elysium, these commanders had apparently never encountered any reason to change their way of thinking. Too bad for them.

"Actually, it does," she said coolly. It was difficult to keep the edge of contempt out of her tone; judging by the quick sideways glance Marcus gave her, she hadn't entirely succeeded. "Once the Terminator unit was no longer receiving its orders from Skynet, it probably went into standard seek-and-destroy mode. Just bad luck that it caught sight of our Piper — or maybe it was your F-15s. Doesn't really matter now. It sounds like your people have handled the situation."

Almost as if in response to her remark, the flashing red lights abruptly shut off, replaced by normal fluorescents overhead. Her guess had been right — the Air Force general's eyes were pale gray, like chips of ice. They didn't appear to warm appreciably as he stared down at her.

"General Briggs," Dyson said, speaking for the first time, "I'm certain that this was all an unfortunate coincidence. If we could return to the matter at hand —"

"Yes, that," Briggs cut in. He glanced over at his fellow commanders. "We do agree that we're all in this together."

At that comment, Blair felt a little shiver of hope run through her. Maybe, despite their suspicious words, the generals who commanded Elysium meant to give John Connor and the Resistance the help they so desperately needed.

"However…"

Hope turned to cold disappointment, its weight almost a physical presence in the pit of her stomach. After all this, were they to be sent away empty-handed?

She couldn't look at Marcus. If he read the worry in her face, he might feel compelled to step in. And she had a feeling that these generals wouldn't react too kindly to being lectured on generosity — or their apparent lack thereof — by a cyborg. So she waited in silence, even as her hands clenched against the desert camo pants she wore.

"Better to start small," the Marine general said. "Four planes and their accompanying pilots. A dozen Humvees and as much ordinance as they can carry. And a squad of Marines and the necessary troop transports and supplies."

For a second, Blair thought she might burst out laughing. That was their idea of starting small? Connor's unit was down to five planes as it was. The generals thought they were being cautious. She wondered what they'd say if she told them that their "small" contribution would practically double her unit's air power, not to mention seriously expanding their ground capacity. Then again, considering they'd sent one of their own to Connor's base disguised as a radiation-crazed desert rat, they probably knew exactly how weak the core of the Resistance currently was.

It wouldn't be enough to win the war, but she'd spent the last fourteen years focusing on one battle at a time. No reason she couldn't do the same here. Once Connor had proved he was more than worthy of the troops and supplies the generals had sent, most likely they would contribute even more.

"One more thing," General Briggs added. "We'll be sending one of our officers with you. He'll have direct command of the Elysium troops, although of course he'll take orders from John Connor."

_He'd better_, she thought. _Or Connor will send him packing so fast his head'll spin._

All she said, though, was, "Understood." If these hard-faced generals wanted to dictate the terms of their generosity, fine. The important thing was to get fresh troops and supplies back to the Resistance base as quickly as possible.

The Marine general had said "four planes and pilots." That meant they didn't intend to re-outfit her. Maybe they didn't trust someone who hadn't been trained at their base. Still, she thought she might ask about a replacement Warthog…until she looked away from General Briggs and caught sight of Marcus watching her, his expression grim. Maybe he knew what she was about to ask.

Somehow she couldn't do it. The A-10 was a one-man plane. Even if she managed to convince Briggs to hand over another one of his precious jets, it would mean leaving Marcus to travel back to base on one of the troop transports. And she just couldn't find it within herself to do that to him. She couldn't leave him stuck on the ground while she took to the sky.

Crazy. If someone had told her a few weeks ago that she'd pass up the chance for a new set of wings just so she wouldn't hurt a guy she barely knew, she would have said they were nuts. Then again, it was distinctly possible that she was the crazy one. Whatever. There'd be other planes. But there was only one Marcus.

She smiled at him, and, after a brief pause, he nodded. His mouth never lost its grim set, however. Obviously he was less than thrilled with the terms of the deal, but at least he had sense enough to not say anything about it. Well, not here, anyway. She had the feeling she might get an earful once they were alone together.

* * *

The officer assigned to oversee the donated troops was a typical stiff-necked career bastard. Captain Stark. Marcus disliked him on sight, probably more out of instinct than anything else. He'd seen that same buzz-cut and hard jaw on too many cops over the years. Usually they were the prelude to an extended stay in the local lock-up. And the man's blue eyes were piercing as laser sights, even though right now they were shielded from the Mojave sun by a pair of standard-issue mirrored lenses.

At least he hadn't shown any particular interest in Blair, although they had gotten into a bit of a tussle over the Piper. Obviously the brass here had expected her to leave it behind and for her and Marcus to catch a ride in one of the Humvees.

She'd had a slightly different opinion on the subject, however.

"Damn straight I'm flying it back," she informed Captain Stark. She stood by the nose of the little white plane, which was dwarfed by the phalanx of F-15s that had assembled at the end of the runway, and crossed her arms. A few feet away, Marcus repressed a grin.

"Pointless," said Stark. "Top speed is what, 140 knots? You'll never be able to keep up with our F-15s."

"I know. But I can certainly fly a lot faster than your Humvees. We'll be fine. Besides, I'm pretty sure your guys just shot down the last Terminators in a hundred-mile radius. The only things up in the sky will be me and your own pilots."

Stark scowled but didn't say anything. Marcus guessed that further argument would only make it sound as if he wasn't confident in Elysium's recon capabilities. They'd done another sweep before moving the jets and the troop transports topside. The only things stirring up here were some scorpions and a couple of very startled jackrabbits.

Apparently satisfied that she'd outflanked Captain Stark, Blair climbed up into the Piper and began her preflight check. Marcus followed and strapped himself into the co-pilot's seat, although he knew he wouldn't be of any use if Blair actually needed a co-pilot for some reason. Rufus was already lounging on the floor of the passenger compartment.

"That guy sure has a stick up his ass," he remarked, staring out the windshield at Stark's departing form.

She shrugged. "I've dealt with worse. At least he didn't keep arguing with me. I mean, why would we want to go bouncing back to base in a Humvee when we can fly there in style? The F-15s will be doing recon; if they find anything, they'll shoot it down."

True, and although a Piper wasn't exactly what you'd call the world's most maneuverable aircraft, Marcus guessed that Blair had a few tricks up her sleeve in case anything did go wrong on the return trip.

They'd already given the coordinates for the Resistance camp to the generals, who in turn transmitted them to the drivers and pilots. Marcus had felt a little strange about doing so, but he knew trust went both ways. It wouldn't exactly be good form to tell the people who were handing over millions of pre-War dollars'-worth of equipment that sorry, they'd just have to follow the Piper to know which way to go.

Marcus caught a glimpse of Dyson climbing into one of the Humvees. "I didn't know he was tagging along."

Blair glanced up from her instruments and looked out the side window. "Yeah, I guess he wants to meet John, catch up on old times or something. At least, that's what he made it sound like. Maybe he's just stir-crazy from being stuck underground all these years."

"Maybe. Although I could think of a couple hundred spots that would be better for a vacation."

To his surprise, she actually laughed — a real laugh, rich and throaty, with a flicker of a dimple showing in her cheek and little amused crinkles deepening around her eyes. He liked her laugh…and liked even better that he'd been the one to coax it out of her. Somehow he knew she didn't have many opportunities for laughter in her life.

Then she sobered and said, "They probably don't exist anymore. Too bad — I always wanted to see the Eiffel Tower."

"What, the machines blew up Las Vegas, too?"

She laughed again, but this time it sounded a little forced. "Yep. No more blackjack or all-you-can-eat buffets. No fake New York or Venice." She paused. "Come to think of it, maybe the machines did us a favor."

Her radio unit beeped once. "Piper One, this is Captain Stark. Be ready to proceed once the F-15s have cleared the runway."

"Roger that, captain."

Without further comment she buckled her seatbelt, and Marcus followed suit. She flicked a few switches, and the little plane stirred to life, its engines sending faint vibrations through the cabin. Ahead of them, the F-15s lined up in formation at the head of the runway, and then, one by one, they took to the skies, the atmosphere rippling with the shock of their passing. Blair watched them go, dark eyes intent and a little hungry. Marcus didn't know if she was rated to pilot an F-15, but he thought she would have liked a chance to try. Instead, she was stuck with this poky little civilian plane, a cyborg, and a half-breed mutt that was currently sacked out beneath the passenger seats.

Whatever she might currently be feeling, it didn't show in her voice as she toggled the radio. "Piper One preparing for takeoff."

And they taxied down the runway, gaining speed in a strong, controlled arc. The tarmac here was in perfect repair; no bouncing and jouncing over ruts and potholes the way they had back at the Tehachapi municipal airport. The little Piper lifted gracefully into the air, and Marcus felt a little ashamed for thinking of it as poky. It was a good little plane; it wasn't its fault that it wasn't an F-15 Raptor.

He remained silent as Blair brought them up to cruising altitude; already the convoy was far behind them, a barely visible chain of desert-hued camo against the remnants of Highway 58. The plan was for the F-15s to range ahead and scope out the landscape, then loop back at intervals to provide coverage for the convoy. On cue, one of the jets screamed by a few hundred feet overhead. The Piper rocked slightly in the wake of its passage.

"Cutting it a little close, aren't they?"

"Not really. They need to fly low enough to provide defense if necessary. Those pilots know what they're doing."

The hard note in her voice compelled Marcus to ask, "Jealous?"

"Of course I am," she said calmly, then made a minute adjustment to one of the Piper's controls. "You'd know I was lying if I said different. But just because I'd rather be up there with them doesn't mean I can't recognize a good pilot when I see one. Whatever else they've been doing all this time, it's pretty obvious they've gotten plenty of hours in the air."

"And don't you think that's a little strange?"

"How do you mean?"

He hesitated for a few seconds, trying to gather his thoughts. The whole Elysium setup had felt strange from the start, but he'd tried to tell himself that his feelings of unease had stemmed merely from encountering something so far outside his own experience as a secret underground base. He should have remembered it was the times when he hadn't listened to his gut that he'd ended up in trouble.

"Yeah, you can say that Skynet wasn't focused on this area after the first bombs dropped. Not enough people to make hunting them down worth it. But still — do you really expect me to believe that these guys have been out here flying training missions and presumably doing some sort of training exercises on the ground as well, and not once in almost fifteen years have they ever been spotted by the machines?"

Her fine brows drew together. "Well — "

"Hey, maybe they're just really, really lucky. Or — "

"Or what?" she demanded. "Are you trying to tell me they're in league with the machines? Come on, Marcus — it doesn't work that way. Machines don't cooperate with people. Period. If Skynet had found Elysium, it would have made a nice crater right there in the middle of the Mojave."

What she said made sense, but somehow Marcus still wasn't convinced. Somehow he felt the wrongness of the situation, felt it as a crawling unease at the base of his spine, even if he couldn't articulate exactly why he knew things were somehow about to go sideways. "If you say so."

"I do say so." She shifted in her seat so that she could more or less face him while still keeping an eye on the airspace out the windshield. "Look, no offense, but I've been doing this a long time. You've lived in this world for barely two weeks. Suspicious is good — suspicious is what keeps you alive — but I know you're off base with this. You don't like these guys? Fine. We don't have to like them. But we can sure as hell use them."

She turned then so she faced all the way forward. Her chin was lifted, and for a second or two Marcus could only admire the clean lines of her throat, and think of what that smooth skin would feel like against his lips. Then he forced himself to consider what she'd said. She was right — he didn't know this world very well. He'd survived so far because he'd been lucky enough to fall in with some people who had taken a chance on him. So he knew he should extend the same courtesy to the leaders of Elysium, to Dyson and Stark and all the soldiers who accompanied them.

He just wished that doing so didn't leave such a sour taste in his mouth.

* * *

The desert flowed past beneath them, smooth and featureless save for the occasional patch of dry grass and a lone Joshua tree here and there. From time to time one of their escort F-15s would swoop past overhead, but otherwise there was very little to break up the monotony of their journey home. Why, then, did Blair keep feeling odd little prickles of worry tickling the back of her neck, a sour churning in her stomach that she'd like to blame on the coffee she'd drunk back at Elysium but which she guessed had an entirely different source?

Most likely it was just Marcus' heebie-jeebies rubbing off on her. Just because something seemed too good to be true didn't mean it necessarily was. Anyway, the generals hadn't exactly promised her the sun and the moon. Just a little taste, enough to show they had a horse in this race, too. Probably Marcus had his back up about the whole thing because he didn't do too well with authority figures. He hadn't said much about his life pre–Judgment Day. He didn't have to. Upstanding citizens didn't volunteer for research programs like Serena Kogan's. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Marcus had probably spent a lot of time on the wrong side of people like Captain Stark.

She guessed now wasn't the best time to mention such a thing. Marcus hadn't replied to her comment about his not knowing this world very well. Maybe she'd offended him. That hadn't been her intention, but she'd never been one to sugarcoat the truth, and she wasn't about to start now. If he didn't like what she'd said, he could either tell her about it. Or not. He wasn't the type to reveal much of himself. She guessed she couldn't blame him for that, considering the reception he'd gotten at the Resistance camp.

Right now he looked as tense as she felt, jaw set, hands clenched into unconscious fists as they rested on his knees. It couldn't be too much fun for someone like him to just be along for the ride — he couldn't help her with piloting the Piper, after all. If the shit did end up hitting the fan, he'd be completely at the mercy of her flying skills.

Not much chance of that happening, though. Skynet seemed to have abandoned this little corner of the world. And sure, the convoy would arrive at camp hours behind her, partly because of her faster plane, and partly because they'd have to pause long enough to blow up the tanker truck blocking the highway in the hills above Tehachapi. When she'd mentioned the roadblock, Stark had barely shrugged. God knows his squad was carrying enough ordinance to annihilate an even dozen of abandoned tanker trucks. Even with the commotion such an explosion was sure to cause, Blair kind of doubted the convoy would meet any trouble on the road. And if they did…

Another F-15 circled overhead, and she smiled grimly. She was pretty sure any one of those jets was a match for whatever remnants of Skynet's forces that might still be lurking in the area.

Knowing and feeling were two different things, however, and Blair's experience told her she was right to trust her instincts. Better to stay cool and quiet, and wait for whatever might happen. Even if that turned out to be nothing.

Which was exactly what happened. Nothing. The rutted road on the back forty of the almond farm was the best the Resistance base could do for a runway, but it wasn't much worse than the tarmac at Tehachapi's tiny airport, all things considered. The Piper set down and bounced a few times, but then they were taxiing merrily along until they came to a stop a few feet away from a waiting Jeep.

Blair popped open the cabin door and heard Barnes say, "Wow, Hickabick, that's some air support you brought us."

"Bite me," she replied cheerfully. "I'm just the advance guard."

Almost as if in response to her comment, two of the F-15s screamed across the sky before banking hard and heading back toward the highway. Barnes's mouth dropped open a little.

"Yeah," she said, and climbed out of the cabin, Marcus only a few feet behind her. From inside the plane she heard Rufus' excited bark. The over-eager canine almost knocked her down as he squeezed past Marcus and bounded down the steps. At once he went over to one of the stunted almond trees and lifted his leg.

"When you gotta go," remarked Barnes. He awarded Marcus with the briefest of frowns before returning his attention to Blair.

She didn't bother to sigh. Barnes had never warmed up to Marcus, and probably never would. Sure, yeah, he'd rescued John Connor from Skynet's San Francisco facility. That didn't change the fact that, to Barnes, Marcus was just another machine, albeit one with a nice human wrapper.

"Some success," she said. "They weren't going to go whole hog — not to start, anyway — but we've got four F-15s, a dozen Humvees, and a squad of Marines, plus transport, supplies, and ordinance. It's a start."

"A start?" Barnes repeated. "So that desert rat wasn't crazy from radiation?"

"Nope. And he's not a desert rat. He's one of theirs."

"'Theirs' who?"

"Elysium," Marcus said, coming to stand a foot or so away from Blair. "The installation we found in the Mojave. But believe me, all we're getting is the scraps from their table."

Barnes didn't look at Marcus. Instead, he faced Blair and demanded, "Just what did you find out there?"

"Secrets," she said shortly. "Let's get back to HQ. I need to report to Connor." She paused and glanced up toward the sky, now clear of aircraft. The sun was about to descend behind the hills to the west. They had maybe an hour of daylight left. With any luck, she'd be able to tell John Connor everything she knew before the Elysium troops showed up on base.

* * *

Well, at least they hadn't made him wait outside. Marcus had entered John Connor's tent unchallenged, although the sentry narrowed his eyes at him, and Barnes plainly wished he could have told his unwanted companion-at-arms to wait outside. But Blair had sailed past the sentry with Marcus in her wake, and apparently no one wanted to cross swords with a woman so obviously on a mission.

It felt as if they'd left camp eons ago, but really, it had been less than a day. Marcus didn't know why he had expected to see some alteration in the Resistance leader, and of course there was none. John Connor still sat propped up in his modified camp chair; the IV was still attached to his left arm, feeding him saline and anti-rejection drugs and God knows what else. Kate Connor stood a few feet behind him, eyes shadowed with fatigue. Marcus wondered how much sleep she'd actually gotten since the night she'd placed a stranger's heart inside her husband's chest.

"Report," said Connor. His gaze was fixed on Blair.

She did just that, giving an unembellished account of their journey across the Mojave, as well as all that they'd discovered at Elysium. Connor's lids flickered just the faintest bit when she mentioned Daniel Dyson, but otherwise he listened in stoic silence as she detailed the supplies and personnel the brass at Elysium had deigned to give them. As she finished up her report, Connor stirred slightly and asked,

"No plane for you?"

Was it Marcus' imagination, or did her gaze shiver in his direction before returning to Connor's face? "No, sir. Apparently they didn't want to spare that much."

He nodded. "I understand their caution. Not to say that I like it much, but I probably would have done the same in their situation. Still, we can do a lot with what they're sending us. It'll help to have some fresh bodies to assist with recon if nothing else."

From outside the tent Marcus heard the rumble of approaching vehicles, a deep, full-throated sound that couldn't have come from any of the Jeeps or other assorted vehicles the Resistance currently had in its motor pool. No, that could only be roar of a dozen Humvees and their accompanying troop transports.

"Sounds like the cavalry is here," he remarked.

"Guess they didn't have any problems on the road," Connor said. "That's something. It means this area is as clean as we'd hoped. Our scouts haven't come across anything, either, but that doesn't always mean much."

The noise of the convoy grew louder, then muted itself to a steady growl as the trucks apparently stopped a few yards away from Connor's HQ. Marcus heard some sort of an exchange between the sentry outside and the newcomers, and then the flap to the tent was lifted, and Captain Stark and Daniel Dyson strode inside.

If John Connor recognized Dyson, his expression didn't reveal it. The other man smiled and began to step forward, hand outstretched, but Barnes neatly inserted himself between Dyson and Connor.

"That's far enough," he warned.

Dyson stopped at once, but he shot a reproachful look at John Connor. "You should know that I of all people am on your side."

"Probably," Connor agreed, "but my people tend to be a little protective. Also, we're trying to reduce the risk of contamination. You might have heard that I had an operation recently."

Marcus had to fight back a grin at the look of dismay on Dyson's face. He wanted to laugh at a scientist not stopping to think about communicating his germs to a transplant patient. Not that Connor had taken any unusual precautions — he certainly hadn't kept himself isolated, but on the other hand, Marcus couldn't think of an occasion where he'd seen anyone touch him except Kate, who always wore surgical gloves.

"Right, right," Dyson said. "Sorry." He straightened a little, and indicated the man who stood to his left. "Connor, this is Captain Stark, commander of the Elysium troops."

Military protocol had pretty much gone out the window in the Resistance camp as far as Marcus could tell, but even so, he was fairly certain no one had expected what happened next. No salute, no acknowledgment whatsoever — except that suddenly Stark leaped forward, firearm in his hand.

And that gun was pointed directly at John Connor's heart.


	6. Chapter 6

See, the wait wasn't nearly as long this time! Thank you to everyone for all of your wonderful reviews, and for your continuing interest in this story.

* * *

Chapter 6

Blair reached for her sidearm, even as she tasted futility in her mouth. She'd never pull the gun free of its holster in time. Who could have known Stark could be so fast?

She barely had time to formulate the thought before Marcus pushed past her, reaching for Stark's gun hand. He moved so quickly he barely registered as an olive-drab blur before he tackled the older man, brutally forcing him to the ground. The crack of a bullet emerging from its barrel echoed in her ears, but the shot went wild — she could see a hole open up in the fabric of the tent just a few inches above John Connor's head. If it had been a bit more to the right, it would have torn right through Kate Connor's shoulder.

Almost at the same instant, Barnes joined the fray, pinning Stark's thrashing legs to the ground. Rather, he attempted to do so and was kicked halfway across the tent for his trouble, and crashed into Dyson. Both men went down, even as the sentry rushed in from outside.

"Son - of - a - bitch," Marcus panted, slamming his fist into Stark's jaw.

Blair winced as she saw metal glint beneath Marcus' split knuckles, then felt her mouth drop open as she saw the same gleam of hyper-processed alloy along Stark's chin. _You've got to be fucking kidding…_

Marcus must have seen the same thing, for he doubled his attack, pummeling the supposed officer so brutally that if he'd been a real man, he would most likely have succumbed at once to the blows. But Stark only writhed under the assault, fingers digging into Marcus' arms where they held him down against the floor. Patches of red began to seep out from beneath the fatigue jacket Marcus wore, but he didn't budge. At the same time, the sentry and Barnes each tackled one of Stark's legs.

Then Blair's ears rang once again with the sound of a bullet — only this time it came from the intended victim. She saw that John Connor held a smoking Glock in his lap. Stark went limp, blood pouring out of a hole in his throat.

"That should hold him for a bit," Connor said. His tone was cool, as if he hadn't just escaped yet another assassination attempt. "At least long enough to get him restrained. Barnes, Marcus — take him to the machine shop."

Barnes looked less than thrilled at having Marcus designated as his partner in dragging Stark off to lock-up, but he only nodded and slipped one arm under Stark's drooping form. Marcus took up the other side and shot Blair a tight-lipped stare before hauling the man out of the Connor's tent.

_Turns out your heebie-jeebies were right, Marcus_, she thought. If only she'd trusted his instincts a little better…

"I didn't know!" gasped Dyson, who had just climbed back to his feet. "I swear I had no idea!"

"I believe you," Connor said, almost dismissively. "Otherwise, I doubt you would've been within a mile of me when that thing went off. Still," he added, "better go out and check on the rest of the troops you brought along. Just in case."

Dyson swallowed and ducked back out through the tent flap.

"You really think there could be more of them?" Blair asked. Her hands were shaking a little. Just reaction. That was all.

"No. I'm guessing this one was a sleeper agent of some sort. The rest are probably just grunts. Never hurts to make sure, though."

She wondered what Connor thought Dyson could do if he came up against another Terminator, and repressed a grim smile. Probably if she peeked outside right now she'd find the troops from Elysium surrounded by every able-bodied soldier Connor had on hand.

"Looks like you'll need to thank Marcus all over again," Kate said, then stepped forward to lay her fingers against John's wrist. No doubt she was measuring his pulse after all the excitement, but Blair thought she saw something more intimate in that touch, as if by gauging her husband's heartbeat she could reassure herself that he was still with her.

"Yes," Connor said, and nodded. "Blair, let Marcus and Barnes know I'll be over there in a few minutes."

"Of course."

She exited the tent and made her way across the encampment to the machine shop. Of course it wasn't a real jail, but it boasted some sturdy metal frames left over from the farm's almond-harvesting days, along with a good collection of chains. It was the only place at all suitable for restraining a Terminator.

When she entered the building, she found Stark already tethered up against one wall with enough steel to hold a bulldozer in place. Barnes stood a few paces off, gun held at the ready. Marcus, however, had positioned himself only a foot or so away from the prisoner. He stood there, staring across the space between them, and his expression was grimmer than Blair had yet seen it.

"Doesn't look very lively," she remarked.

At the sound of her voice, Marcus started slightly, then shrugged. "Appearances can be deceiving."

He kicked some dirt in Stark's direction, and at once the Terminator began to struggle against its chains. Despite herself, Blair took a step back. Behind her, Barnes chuckled.

"Don't worry. That one's not going anywhere."

Her eyes told her that, but still every instinct in her body was telling her to run. What was it about Stark that set off all her inner alarms, whereas with Marcus she'd felt none of the fear that Terminators usually evoked?

_Well, for one thing, it's because he's _not_ a Terminator_, she told herself. _Also, he never tried to blow John Connor's brains out._

"Guess you were right," she said, after she had paused only a foot or so away from Marcus.

He didn't turn. "This is one time I wish I had been wrong."

Without hesitating, she slid her hand into his, felt the warmth of his skin against her chilled fingers. Whether it was to reassure him that he was a far, far different creature than the spy currently suspended before them in chains, or whether it was to remind herself that Marcus was as much flesh and blood as she was, Blair couldn't say for sure. Whatever her reasons for initiating the contact, it felt good to hold his hand, and even better that he didn't try to pull his fingers from hers. Maybe he was as much in need of reassurance as she.

She said, "Dyson swears he knew nothing about it."

Marcus gave a short, humorless laugh. "He would. What's happening with the Elysium troops?"

"I don't think they know anything yet. I took a quick look before I walked over here, and it looks as if our people are keeping them occupied with unloading the trucks and getting them settled. If there were any other Terminators with them, they probably would have acted by now."

He didn't reply, but only stared across the space separating him from Stark. As if feeling the weight of Marcus' gaze, the Terminator raised its head, eyes glowing redly behind the false blue of its irises.

"Looks like he's coming 'round," John Connor said from the doorway.

Both Blair and Marcus turned, Marcus' hand sliding from hers so quickly she wondered if he had been glad of the excuse to break off the contact. Did he think she cared whether or not Connor saw them together?

He sat in a wheelchair, with Kate guiding it. But there was no weakness in his gaze as it settled on Stark's chained form. By some unspoken request, Kate pushed the wheelchair forward until it was level with where Marcus stood.

"You," Connor said, staring at Stark. "Are there more of you?"

It made no reply, but only gazed back at the man who had been its intended target. Blair noticed that the abraded regions on its jaw were already beginning to heal, and she frowned. Normal Terminators didn't have that kind of regenerative ability. Only Marcus —

She bit her lip, and wondered if Marcus had noticed the same thing.

"Define 'more,'" it said, and its red-hued gaze flickered in Marcus' direction before returning to Connor.

"Were there other Terminators in the forces at Elysium?"

It shrugged, chains clanking with the movement.

Connor asked, "Does that mean you don't know, or you won't say?"

Another shrug.

Barnes spoke from the shadows in the corner of the machine shop. "I'm thinking a couple of thousand volts might loosen it up a little. Want me to crank up the generator?"

Connor raised a hand, even as the Terminator began to laugh. At least, that was what Blair assumed it was doing. The sound was hoarse from its throat wound and yet mechanical, as if Stark had studied human patterns of speech without truly internalizing their natural rhythms. She wanted to raise her hands to cover her ears, but instead settled for moving a few inches closer to Marcus.

"Torture?" it asked. "Go ahead and try."

"No point," Connor said. "We both know that. However," he added, "we can take you offline long enough to get an info dump." To Blair's surprise, he lifted himself out of the wheelchair and stepped forward. She saw the gleam of a hypodermic in his hand. "Thanks to Marcus here, we have a pretty good idea of what's required to knock you out for a few hours."

Stark snarled, but of course the machine could do nothing, chained up as it was. Connor slid the hypodermic into the blood-splattered skin of its neck, and at once its head lolled forward. As if on cue, a couple of Kate's medics entered the machine shop, pushing a gurney.

"Undo the chains," Connor told Marcus.

He obeyed, but Blair noticed the hesitancy of his movements, as if he didn't want to get too close to Stark's limp form. She didn't think it was fear; she guessed that he had seen the same telltales she had, that he'd begun to come to some unpleasant conclusions.

The medics hoisted Stark onto the gurney and wheeled him away. Kate hesitated for a few seconds, obviously loath to leave her husband's side.

"Go ahead," he said. "I think the danger's past for now. Besides, I have a feeling we all want to know what secrets Stark's been hiding…"

* * *

Since his reawakening in this grim world, Marcus had experienced more than a few nightmares. Some were simple enough — of being trapped in a building with the machines at every side, or of being chased by those same machines, or even finding himself strapped to the execution chair as the world exploded around him in nuclear heat. The most terrible, however, were the ones where he reached up to touch his face and encountered only cold, hard metal, with every ounce of humanity somehow melted away.

This was worse, though. Much worse.

He wished he had some reason to send Blair away. He didn't want her watching this. But he knew she had more right to be here than he did, that if John Connor were just a little less understanding or forgiving it would be he, Marcus, who was sent away from the operating room. Or maybe even strapped down on a gurney next to Stark.

They had laid open Stark's chest cavity, showing the alloy endoskeleton inside, as well as the human-seeming heart that still beat away underneath. Leads ran from the back of his head to a computer. It had taken the Resistance's best hacker a little more than an hour to access the information within the implant at the base of his skull, to give the commands that would loosen the machine's tongue.

Now Stark was talking…and Marcus didn't much like what he heard.

"Too late," he said, eyes staring sightlessly out of his head. "You stopped me, but you can't stop them."

"Can't stop who?" John Connor demanded. For the interrogation, he'd abandoned his wheelchair and stood propped up on crutches. He looked very pale, although that might have been because of the glaring lights overhead.

The corners of Stark's mouth pulled up in a mirthless smile. The expression reminded Marcus of a shark he'd once seen washed up on the beach at Corpus Christi.

"The others. You think Skynet only made one of us?" The machine tilted its head slightly in Marcus' direction, even though the techs had reassured the onlookers that Stark's optics had been disabled. "The traitor here isn't unique."

"How many?" Connor's voice would never crack, but Marcus could hear the tension in every syllable.

"Enough."

"_How many?_"

The smile didn't waver. "Ask your friends at Elysium."

For a few seconds Connor remained silent, staring down at the infiltrator unit. Then, very slowly, he lifted his radio unit to his lips. "Hodge."

"Here, sir."

"Have Dyson contact his base."

"Sir?"

"Now, Hodge."

"Copy that, sir."

More time crawled by, as Connor stood leaning on his crutches. Despite the chilly air within the medical tent, Marcus could feel a drop of sweat slide down the back of his neck. Stark had to be bluffing. Just messing with them. The Terminator had to know how much the Elysium forces meant to the future of the Resistance. A few minutes of psychological torture might be the last weapon he had left in his arsenal.

Connor's radio crackled, and he picked it up once more. "Connor here."

"Sir, Dyson is unable to make contact with the base."

"Unable?"

"As far as we can tell, the equipment is functioning correctly. There's just…no one there."

"Got it. Have him keep trying."

"Yes, sir."

"You're wasting your time," Stark said, and then let out another one of those spine-scraping laughs.

"Yes," Connor said, "I am." He gestured toward Kate. She stepped forward and neatly plunged a hypodermic into the infiltration unit's neck. Unlike a true man, he didn't so much go limp as simply fall slack. His open eyes continued to stare at the white operating theater lights overhead.

"Have the techs get a complete dump from his memory," Connor told her. "Maybe that'll give us something useful."

Kate nodded, her face very pale. She understood the implications of Elysium's radio silence as well as anyone.

Without a glance at anyone else, Connor hobbled out of the medical tent. Across the space, Blair's dark eyes met his.

More than ever, Marcus wished she hadn't been here to witness Stark's interrogation. No one had said anything about the similarities between the captured infiltrator and himself, but Marcus wasn't stupid. He'd seen the way Barnes glanced from him to Stark and then back again, and he'd seen the flicker of Kate's eyes as she'd opened up Stark's chest to reveal his machine innards. She'd performed the procedure neatly, quickly. That sort of thing was always easier the second time around.

The tension seemed to build until it was almost a physical pressure on his eardrums. That was it. He had to get out of here. What good was he, anyway? He couldn't assist the techs. Besides, he had the feeling if he stayed another moment in the presence of the captured Terminator, he'd explode.

Without saying a word, he exited the tent. Cold night air touched his flushed cheeks. It felt good. Or maybe that was simply the feeling of relief he experienced as soon as he had Stark out of his sight.

The almond farm they were using as a base had a stream that cut across its extreme northwest edge, and it was there Marcus headed. He wasn't sure why, except that it was the most remote spot he could think of to go to and still stay on the farm's grounds. At this season the stream wasn't too wide, maybe a couple of yards across. It wasn't deep or swift-moving enough to conceal a hydrobot. The water was even halfway potable, although Marcus wasn't thirsty.

He paused at the water's edge and watched as it rippled and danced beneath a low-hanging gibbous moon. A soft wind whispered through the trees and set their remaining leaves to fluttering, but other than that the place was entirely silent. No sounds drifted up to him from the camp. He might have been the last man left in the world.

_Last man_, he thought, and felt his lips twist in a bitter smile. That was a joke. Half a man, maybe. Or even less, judging by the amount of metal Kate Connor's careful autopsy of Stark had revealed.

"Hey."

He whirled, hand straying to the Beretta at his hip.

But it was only Blair, her face a blurred oval in the dim moonlight. She stopped a yard or so away from him. "You sure bugged out of there fast."

"Hmm."

"The camp's going crazy. Dyson wants to head back to Elysium right now. Connor wants to wait until sunrise. I agree — if Elysium's gone, it's gone, and at least in daylight we'll have a better chance to survey the situation."

"Makes sense, I guess."

She took a few steps in his direction. "What is it, Marcus? I'm having a hard time believing that you'd be this eaten up over losing Elysium. I sort of got the impression you weren't a big fan of those guys."

He'd never been good with words. How the hell was he supposed to tell her that he hated seeing the truth of what he was thrust in his face? How could he begin to explain that he hated what he'd become even more than he hated the man he'd once been? The other members of the Resistance probably would never accept him, and he was all right with that. He'd spent most of his life not giving a shit what other people thought.

But Blair —

He found he cared a lot. The world could go hang as long as he knew she had his back. But seeing Stark laid out like that could only have brought home to her how alien Marcus was as well. Maybe he'd fought against Skynet's programming and won, but that didn't change the fact that inside he was as much a machine as the infiltrator unit.

"If it's true, it sucks," he replied, deliberately keeping his tone casual. "Guess we won't know for sure until daylight."

"Yeah, it would definitely suck," she agreed. "I don't think that's it, though. Was it Stark?"

Sometimes she could be a little too perceptive. Served him right for thinking he had a chance with a woman like her. He didn't have much experience with smart women. He said nothing, but crossed his arms and stared down into the shifting patterns of lights that danced across the stream's surface.

"You're not Stark," she said. She moved closer, and he felt her cold fingers wrap around his. "Maybe Serena Kogan had a hand in making Stark, too. I don't know — I guess that's something the techs will find out. But you know what? I don't really care."

He found his voice. "You should."

"Why? That's not what counts. This — " She tapped his chest with her free hand. " — this is what counts. And this." She raised the same hand and pressed it gently against his temple. "Marcus Wright beat Skynet, remember? Stark is just another one of its tools. You're nothing alike, no matter what you might have seen back in that tent." Her mouth curved in a small smile, and Marcus realized he still had a reserve of heat somewhere inside him, in some part that had remained a man. "Because I guarantee you that I would never have done this with Captain Stark."

And she raised both her hands to his face, then lifted her mouth to his. That wasn't just heat within him — it was the pulsing core of a nuclear reactor. He reached out and pulled her close, felt the lithe warmth of her body even through the baggy fatigues and beat-up old flight jacket that was two sizes two big. She seemed to melt into him, her hands moving down to his neck, her lips so very warm, so very soft.

For days he'd wanted to kiss her again, but the opportunity had never presented itself. Trust Blair to take matters into her own hands. Such capable hands, too, he realized, as they trailed down his neck to his chest and traced across his collarbone to the zipper of his combat jacket.

He was willing to go with it — it wouldn't be the first time he'd been with a woman outdoors, although a summer evening in Texas back then was considerably warmer than the post-nuclear chill of the current California night. And whatever parts Serena Kogan had tampered with, it didn't seem they had much effect on his libido. He wanted Blair, wanted her now, and as far as he could tell, the only thing stopping them was the clothes they were wearing.

But no sooner had he reached out to grasp the zipper of Blair's own jacket than he heard Barnes call out, "What the hell are you doing out here?"

Startled, Marcus lifted his mouth from Blair's, even as she let out a little gasp and stepped backward. He thought he heard her mutter, "Cock-blocking bastard."

There being no real way to salvage the situation, Marcus crossed his arms and lifted an eyebrow at Barnes. "What are _you_ doing out here?"

Barnes scowled, but Marcus noted how the other man's gaze flickered toward Blair, to a mouth that even in the dim light looked a little swollen with passion. Maybe they were both a too old to be acting like a couple of kids caught kissing in the stairwell between classes, but that was about how Marcus felt right now.

"Connor wants to see you. Now."

"What for?" Blair asked.

Barnes shrugged. "I assume the man wants to tell you himself. I'm just the errand boy." His tone was a little too studiedly casual, though. Marcus guessed that he'd seen what he and Blair were doing and was none too happy about it. Not that Barnes had any designs on Blair — at least, Marcus had never gotten that vibe from the man. No, it was probably just that he didn't much like having one of his closest friends engaged in heavy-duty lip-lock with a cyborg.

"All right, we'll find out for ourselves. Come on, Marcus."

There didn't seem to be much point in arguing. He trailed along behind Blair and Barnes, various portions of his anatomy protesting vigorously the abrupt change in their fortunes. Was it possible for a cyborg to get blue balls?

Even if it was, he didn't think was going to get any relief tonight. Blair was irritated; he could tell that much from the way she stared straight ahead and didn't bother to engage Barnes in any further conversation, or the way she swatted at some brush that blocked the path with a little more force than was strictly necessary. She was too much of a professional to do much more than that, however. Marcus guessed she'd wanted this evening to end differently, but he also knew she wouldn't give Barnes the satisfaction of knowing he'd made a hash of the first truly intimate moment she'd been able to spend with Marcus.

It was getting on 22:00, a time when the camp would normally be hunkering down for the evening, save for the night sentries. Now, though, the Elysium troops milled around their Humvees and troop transports like ants whose hill had been kicked over, and a double complement of guards manned both the main road into the base as well as the entrance to Connor's tent.

Barnes pushed the flap aside and held it open for Blair, then conveniently let it slip just as Marcus was about to enter. The harsh canvas scraped against his face before he shoved it out the way. Asshole.

Connor was back in his wheelchair, Marcus noticed. One of the Elysium troops, a man he didn't recognize, stood next to Connor. The unknown soldier, a sergeant by the chevron on his sleeve, was doing a pretty good job of looking simultaneously very pissed off and very worried.

"We had no reason to guard against one of our own," he was saying, then broke off as Marcus paused directly behind Blair.

"Maybe not, but I have to say you don't have a very good track record right now." Connor looked up from the table in front of him, which was scattered with maps. "Blair, are you rated for an F-15?"

Marcus almost felt her start. "Am I what?"

"Can you fly an F-15?"

"I may not be able to manage all of its more advanced components at first, but I know I can bring one up and set her down all in one piece."

"Good enough." John Connor smiled, but there was little humor in his expression. "As far as we can tell, Elysium is gone. I wanted to wait until morning to survey the situation. Daniel Dyson, on the other hand, felt that immediate confirmation was the better course. He convinced one of his pilots to take him back to Elysium."

"Oh, shit," Blair breathed. Then, "Sorry, sir."

"That's okay, Blair. I think 'oh, shit,' sums it up pretty well."

"How long have they been gone?" she asked.

"Ten, fifteen minutes."

"That's a heck of a head start in an F-15."

"True. And maybe I should just let him go. But that plane's too valuable. Two of you stand a better chance than one against whatever's out there."

"Understood." Once again, Marcus felt her hand creep into his. Now her fingers shook a little, as if with barely repressed excitement. "Those are F-15Es, correct?"

Connor nodded.

"Then there's room for Marcus." She turned toward him and grinned. "Ready to be my weapons officer?"

Despite experiencing some relief at not being left behind while Blair went off hot-dogging in a shiny new fighter jet, Marcus felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. Weapons officer?

_Oh, shit_ did sum it up pretty well…


	7. Chapter 7

Well...I know it's been a long time since I updated this story. But at least I made it back before a full year was up! (Ducks the barrage of rocks and rotten tomatoes.) Seriously, I've had a very busy year - I've published two novels and a novella, along with a handful of short stories, and I wrote another novella and finished yet another novel, so I just haven't had a lot of time for fanfic writing. I didn't want to let this one go forever, though - it's not fair to all you wonderful readers out there. So mea culpa, and I hope you enjoy this latest installment. I do have the next chapter already plotted out, so it shouldn't be nearly so long a wait for that one.

* * *

Seven

Jesus, what a beautiful bird. Blair knew she had to focus on the unfamiliar controls, keep moving so they wouldn't lose any more precious minutes, but some part of her just wanted to sit there and run her hands over the glowing readouts on the dash, to close her eyes and feel the contoured seat support every muscle. No time for that, though. No time for anything, except to run through as thorough a preflight check as she could manage. Just a few feet behind her, Marcus had already been strapped into the weapon systems officer's seat, with strict instructions not to touch anything except the targeting systems. The WSO could theoretically fly the plane if something happened to the pilot, but Marcus had looked only too happy to be told that he wasn't expected to do anything except shoot at anything that started shooting at him. Even that was a complicated enough affair, given the multiple screens he had to use as part of the F-15E's weapons system, but a target was a target, after all — Blair could only hope he'd be able to manage, should the occasion arise.

Her borrowed pressure suit seemed to weigh on her legs; she'd never bothered with that sort of thing in her old A-10, but an F-15 was faster.

A lot faster.

The power at her command frightened her a little. The merest touch on the throttle seemed to awaken something as fierce and unpredictable as the dragons in the fantasy novels she'd like to read back in high school. And, like those dragons, this one breathed fire as well.

The battered road leading to the almond farm had to serve as a runway, and even that seemed uncomfortably short. Still, she couldn't worry about that, couldn't worry about much of anything as she pointed the borrowed fighter jet eastward…except hope that volunteering for this mission wouldn't turn out to be a case of spectacular insanity.

"You're clear," came Lt. Alarcon's voice through her headset. The other woman had been a flight instructor back in the day; now she functioned as the Resistance operation's de facto air traffic controller and sometime pilot wrangler.

"Got it, Tower," Blair replied, and increased pressure on the throttle. The jet surged forward, eager to back in the sky.

Although she knew the F-15 was capable of extreme takeoffs that could have it up to thirty thousand feet in barely a minute, the rutted road that stood in for a runway would never stand up to that kind of treatment. She opted for a more modest departure, but even so the Strike Eagle lifted into the air with a speed that might have been frightening, if it weren't so exhilarating. Even the pull of the unaccustomed G-forces wasn't enough to keep a grin off her face — or maybe it was the pull of gravity that stretched her mouth so wide. In her ear, she heard Marcus mutter an expletive.

"Doing okay back there, Wright?"

"Great!"

Maybe he was lying, but at the moment she didn't much care. They lifted into the night, eating the miles, moving at speeds that even Skynet's machinery of death couldn't match. Since their destination was so relatively close, she wouldn't bother to bring them to Mach 1. Even at subsonic speeds, they'd reach Elysium in less than ten minutes.

Although she'd spent many years flying in the post–Judgment Day world, she was still struck by how black the night was. All around her the cockpit glowed with color, as the various readouts assured her that all was stable, and that they were flying high enough to pass over the mountains and down into the Mojave. But beyond that little bubble of light, darkness surrounded her on all sides, reminding her once again of how far mankind had fallen. Even in a region as remote as this, the old world would have sent flickers of careless light toward the stars, from farms and gas stations and truck stops. But nothing broke up the sea of black below her.

Nothing except —

"Holy shit!"

Fire blossomed in the desert, searingly bright in the darkness. Orange and red and hungry yellow, all feeding on what used to be Elysium. She saw no sign of any attackers, just billows of smoke even blacker than the night, outlined by the fires that steadily consumed the secret base.

_Not so secret, I guess._ Blair gritted her teeth and began to angle the Strike Eagle downward as she checked her instruments. No sign of Dyson's borrowed F-15, but an ominous blip from three o'clock told her they had some kind of company.

"Blair — " came Marcus' voice from her headset.

"I see it," she said. "H-K, approaching fast. Get ready to fire."

"Got it."

They had gone over the weapons systems back at the Resistance base, just a crazy-short crash course in how to fire the Sidewinders and the 20mm cannon — although she sincerely hoped that the H-K wouldn't get close enough for Marcus to have to resort to using the Vulcan.

"Target locked," Marcus said, sounding calm as if he'd done this sort of thing every day for the past ten years. She supposed she should be grateful for the cyborg-modified parts of his brain, the ones that gave him enhanced reflexes and the ability to understand and operate technology he never could have handled back before Serena Kogan's gang of mad scientists got hold of him.

The Sidewinders burst off into the darkness, bright streaks of destruction. At the same time, the H-K sent out its own little packages of death in the form of sharp blasts from its laser cannons.

Shit. Blair banked the Strike Eagle to the left and dropped fast — too fast. She still wasn't used to the hair-trigger response of the F-15, which made her own A-10 feel like a '79 Chevy Monte Carlo compared to a tricked-out Corvette. Her stomach seemed to lodge itself somewhere in the lower reaches of her throat, but at least the H-K's salvo had missed them completely.

A burst of light told her the Sidewinder had connected. But as she scanned her instruments, she saw that it had been a glancing blow; the H-K had jinked right just as the missile closed in, and the shot only grazed the underside of one wing. That wing, however, had carried half its complement of missiles and cannons, all of which were now inoperative.

"Hit it again, Marcus!"

He didn't reply, but another Sidewinder streaked out into the darkness almost before she had finished saying his name. The H-K, obviously pissed that they'd managed to hit it at all, sent forth another burst of laser cannon fire.

But she'd been expecting that, and dropped the Strike Eagle, dropped in a fast spiral that elicited a sharp outburst from Marcus and brought them spinning toward the desert floor. She was beginning to feel it now, that melding of her hands and brain with the controls of the aircraft. Did that make her some kind of cyborg, too?

Maybe. At the moment she didn't really care. She wanted to laugh out loud, laugh even though the H-K continued to fire, even though the hopes of the Resistance were burning along with the ruins of Elysium a thousand feet beneath her. Because she was in the air again, and the sky was hers, and nothing was going to stop her — not even that H-K.

She pulled up at the last minute, gravity dragging at her stomach and legs, shooting the jet almost straight skyward so the H-K's fire blazed away harmlessly beneath the F-15's tail. And then the machine didn't have time to fire again, because the Sidewinder connected, and a ball of white-hot metal exploded out into the darkness.

No time to cheer, though, because the instruments told her another H-K was out there, this one riding the trail of what had to be Dyson's F-15. Blair banked right and headed toward it, hoping that maybe it hadn't noticed them yet, but knowing of course it had. It was a machine. Machines didn't overlook intruders in their vicinity, especially intruders that had just blown up one of their buddies.

"Marcus — "

"Got it."

A third Sidewinder shot out toward the H-K, and she hoped that would do it, because now they only had one left. Sure, they had the Vulcan cannon, but she really would prefer to not get that close if at all possible.

A flare of light made her squint a little, but it wasn't the Sidewinder connecting. Instead, she swallowed the sour taste of dismay as she saw the other F-15 explode in its own little mini nova, shrapnel raining down on the fiery landscape below. She wanted to shut her eyes so she wouldn't have to watch the destruction of that beautiful bird, but she didn't have time for that. The H-K might have just killed Dyson, but she wasn't going to let them take her and Marcus.

Maybe it had been a little distracted after all, or maybe the explosion from the F-15 it had just blown up scrambled its sensors for just a microsecond. But whatever the reason, the H-K didn't seem to have detected the Sidewinder streaking toward it — not until it was too late.

The Hunter-Killer's explosion was even more dramatic than the F-15's, probably because it had a lot more mass to detonate. In a gaudy flash of yellow and white light, it broke apart into a million pieces, raining superheated shards of metal through the cold night air.

"Nice shootin', Tex," she said softly, but there was no mockery in her voice this time. True, the Sidewinders had their own sophisticated little brains that led them to their targets, but still, it had been Marcus who had known when to pull the trigger.

"No problem. Any more of them out there?"

She glanced down at her instruments just to be sure, but she already knew they were alone now. "Looks like we're clear. I'm going to set down."

"Set down? Where?"

"Looks like the runway's still more or less intact. And the machines did a great job of lighting it up for us."

* * *

Blair was right — the runway was there, all right, and the billowing flames illuminated the strip of asphalt almost as well as a bank of klieg lights would have. Even though Marcus knew they were no safer down on the ground than they had been in the air — less, probably — he couldn't help but let out a little exhalation of relief as the Strike Eagle rolled to a stop. Blair might love the sky, but he just wanted to feel solid ground beneath his feet.

The canopy popped open, and he undid his harness and extricated himself from the seat. No ground crew waiting for them here; he had to maneuver out of the cockpit and then drop to the tarmac on his own. It was enough of a fall that he could feel the jolt in his knees when he hit the ground, but he didn't mind. He was just grateful that they'd made it down in one piece.

"Want to play catch?" came Blair's voice, and she began to slide down the side of the F-15. Without stopping to think, he stepped forward just in time to reach out and grab her around the middle and lower her the rest of the way to the ground.

Her body felt taut and yet fragile, with the way his hands could almost span the slender circle of her waist beneath the flight suit. Heat flashed through his groin, but then she was already moving away from him, her head up as she surveyed the ruined landscape. Just as well. He had the feeling she probably wouldn't have appreciated a groping right then.

"I see movement," she said.

His hand dropped to the Beretta he wore on his belt.

"Not that kind of movement," she added, and then broke into a run.

He followed her as she zigzagged around two apparently intact Humvees and headed away from the tarmac, out into the open desert. The glare from the burning facility lit the landscape well enough that he could see she was headed for a dark figure writhing against the pale sand — a figure who had the remains of a parachute beginning to smolder around him.

"You're a lucky son of a bitch," Blair remarked, even as she dropped to her knees, pulled out a knife, and began cutting through the parachute lines so she could free the trapped scientist.

Dyson's only reply was a moan, which Marcus figured was merited, given the situation.

He dropped to his knees next to Blair and drew his own knife. Within less than a minute, they had the lines free, and Marcus reached down to pull Dyson to his feet. At once the other man stumbled and shook his head.

"Leg," he explained.

Marcus glanced down and then wished he hadn't. A stump of bone protruded from the left calf of Dyson's flight suit, and the fabric was stained dark with blood.

"He's not going far on that," Marcus told Blair, and she gave a grim nod.

"See if you can find something to splint it."

That wasn't too difficult, given the debris scattered all around them. He gave the immediate area a quick scan, found a broken-off piece of metal that could have come from either the F-15 or the H-K, and handed it to Blair.

"This is going to hurt," she said.

Dyson couldn't exactly go pale, but his mouth looked pinched. Still, he sounded calm enough as he replied, "I know."

She pulled a length of rope out of one of her pockets, cut it in half, and then bound the piece of metal to Dyson's leg. Marcus knew he was probably imagining things, but somehow he thought he could hear the broken edges of bone grinding together as she finished tying off the makeshift splint.

"Painkillers…med center…" Dyson managed.

Blair lifted an eyebrow. "What med center? The base is destroyed. All we can do now is get out of here."

"Not all. I'll show you. Saw it — from the air."

"You didn't see anything. We need to get out of here."

"No."

With a sigh, she got to her feet. "Your funeral. You'll probably walk ten steps and pass out, and then Marcus and I can put you in the back of one of those Humvees I saw back there and take you home."

"No."

She shot a significant glance at Marcus, and then shrugged just before she slipped an arm around Dyson's waist so he could lean on her. A second later, Marcus realized she wanted him to do the same, so he hurried over and added his own support. This was crazy, and Blair was right — no way Dyson could go more than a few steps with a compound fracture before he realized that he wasn't going to be walking anywhere except toward a transport home.

Except somehow he did. Sure, he moved with excruciating slowness, and the reflected light from the fires caught in the beads of sweat on his forehead and glittered there like little chips of citrine and amber and garnet — but he did keep moving.

Blair said nothing, but Marcus could see her gaze darting here and there, as if she kept expecting a squad of T-800s to emerge from the darkness to mow them down. Hell, he still didn't know how everything worked in this future, but you'd think with all the destruction around them, there would have been some sign of the Terminators.

The weird thing was, the base didn't exactly look as if it had been bombed from above. As they grew closer to the few remaining buildings, it appeared that they were more or less intact, except for the flames billowing around them. If H-Ks and other aerial assault vehicles had attacked Elysium, shouldn't it have been flat as a pancake?

"This — way," panted Dyson, who led them to an unobtrusive series of steps at the base of a small hill, steps that led down to a door that had been blown open.

"Wait," Blair said, and pulled out her own sidearm. Here, at the periphery of the base, the light wasn't as good, but he could see well enough that the door opened into some kind of hallway, a hallway that appeared to be deserted.

Parts of Elysium must have still had some sort of power; Marcus saw the eerie flicker of shorting fluorescents down a corridor painted the same unpleasant pale green as the rest of the base. He didn't detect any movement.

For some reason, though, the sight of that empty hallway made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle, and he found himself hoping that Dyson would faint right then so he and Blair could get him the hell out of there.

No such luck.

"Looks clear," Dyson said. "Come on."

Blair hesitated, then nodded. She did not replace her gun in its holster, but instead held it at the ready as she slipped back under Dyson's right shoulder.

Somehow they managed to limp their way down the steps, the scientist wincing with every movement. Since Marcus was supporting Dyson on the left side, he'd either have to go unarmed or try to shoot with his left hand.

He reached down and wrapped his fingers around the pistol's grip, and held the Beretta out as well. Just have to hope that Serena Kogan's crew had given him equal enhancements on both the right and the left sides.

The three of them shuffled their way into the corridor, their footsteps echoing off the linoleum and sickly green walls. The hallway went only a short distance and made a 90-degree turn to the left. When they turned the corner, they saw their first bodies.

They lay slumped in the hall, in messy piles that even so showed none of the contortions brought on by the violent death usually meted out by Skynet and its minions. No blood. No powder residue on the walls. Nothing except a bunch of dead soldiers, and what looked like a few civilian support staff.

"What the hell…" Blair murmured. She slid out from underneath Dyson's arms and went to kneel next to one of the dead men.

"Careful," Marcus said, but she appeared to ignore him as she turned the dead soldier over and then recoiled slightly. The unknown man's face was puffed and blackened, his throat swollen above the collar of his jumpsuit.

"G - gas."

Marcus swiveled his head to stare up at the other man. "What?"

"They've been gassed."

"Then we should get out of here!"

At that Blair got to her feet and shook her head. "If he's right, then it's already dissipated. Otherwise, we'd be dead." Her dark eyes narrowed. "So who would gas all your buddies, Dyson?"

He shook his head. "Don't know."

She planted her hands on her hips and watched him carefully for a few seconds. Then she gave the smallest lift of her shoulders before saying, "How far's the med center?"

"Not…too…far."

From the slight tightening Marcus glimpsed at the corners of her mouth, he guessed she wasn't sure Dyson couldn't make it more than a few more steps. But she only nodded. "Don't trip on the bodies."

It turned out that Dyson was right — the corridor came to a T-intersection, with the left-hand side terminating in a pair of double doors with the word "Infirmary" stenciled on each of them.

They found more bodies in there, but at least these dead men lay quietly in their beds. Only two forms in white lab coats were sprawled on the floor, one of them still clutching a clipboard in a now-stiffened hand. Whatever gas had swept through this place, it had to have been horribly fast-acting.

Marcus and Blair eased Dyson down onto one of the unoccupied beds. He let out a groan and closed his eyes as they carefully lifted his legs so they could stretch out in front of him.

"Cabinet — over there," he gasped. "Second shelf."

Blair nodded and crossed the room to the cabinet Dyson had indicated. She pulled on a handle, but nothing happened. "It's locked."

"Keys — on one of the techs."

Since Marcus was closer, he went to one of the white-coated bodies on the floor and knelt next to it. After everything he'd seen and done, he didn't know why it bothered him so much to rifle through the dead man's pockets, to pick him over like some sort of grave robber. But it did, and he felt his mouth thin even as he located a key ring, pulled it out of a pants pocket, and tossed it to Blair.

Wordlessly she caught the keys, then shuffled through them until she found the right one. Her own expression was blank as she opened the cabinet, ticked through its contents, and then located a vial of morphine. She began to lift it out, only to stop as Dyson broke in,

"No."

Her eyebrows lifted. "Isn't this why we came here?"

"Not…morphine. Vicodin."

"You really think a couple pills are going to blank out all that pain?"

"Don't have to blank it. Just…manage it."

She shrugged and turned back to the cabinet. A few seconds later she stepped toward Dyson, holding a bottle. Without saying anything, she opened the bottle and tipped three of the pills inside into the palm of his hand. He dry-swallowed them, and then settled back against the pillow, his eyes shut.

Marcus didn't know if Dyson was just waiting for the pills to kick in, or whether he planned to rest there for awhile. He glanced over at Blair, who said, "Let him rest for a few minutes. We've got work to do."

"Work?"

A satchel hung over the back of a chair next to one of the beds that held a dead patient; she reached out and took the satchel, emptied its contents — which appeared to be a a few dog-eared paperbacks and a shaving kit — and went back to the medicine storage cabinet. Moving quickly, she took handfuls of the medicines inside and began stuffing them into the satchel. After a minute, she paused and threw him an irritated look over her shoulder. "Are you just going to stand there, or are you going to help? Check the other cabinets and drawers — see if there are any other medical supplies we can take. We may have lost Elysium, but we don't have to go back totally empty-handed."

How many years of hardship had trained her to this sort of ruthless efficiency? Too many, Marcus knew, and yet it was the only way humanity had been able to survive this long. Besides, it wasn't as if there were anyone left at Elysium who would need any of this stuff.

He didn't see anything else he could use to carry the loot, but that didn't stop him. Memories of his early years of burglary came back to him as he stripped a sheet from one of the unused beds, then opened a lower unlocked cabinet and began throwing boxes of surgical gloves and gauze and rubber tubing in the center of the sheet.

"How're you…going…to get all that back?" came Dyson's voice.

"I'm not. Marcus is."

"I am?" he asked, stopping with both hands full of surgical masks and bandages.

"A Strike Eagle isn't a cargo plane. We'll load up one of the undamaged Humvees, and you can drive Dyson back to base. I'll cover you from the air."

If he'd stopped to think about it, Marcus knew he should have realized they'd have to follow some sort of similar arrangement to get all three of them out of here; you couldn't fit three people in an F-15, even if they could have come up with some way to get Dyson up into the cockpit without the pain of such a maneuver killing him outright. Still, Marcus didn't like the idea very much, even though they didn't have many alternatives.

At least the Elysium people had blown up the roadblock on Highway 58. They should have a pretty smooth ride back to the Resistance camp — as long as there weren't any more H-Ks lurking around.

Or squads of Terminators, or Harvesters, or any of the other assorted nasties he'd run into since he'd awakened in the world that Skynet had wrought.

Grimly he gathered up the corners of the sheet he'd loaded and knotted them together, making a lumpy, heavy bundle. It wasn't pretty, but it would get the precious medical supplies to Kate Connor, to someplace where they could actually do somebody some good. Then he turned, and saw Blair kneeling next to one of the dead medics, her fingers working as she unlaced his combat boots.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"What does it look like I'm doing?" She sat back on her heels and scowled up at him. "You think this guy needs these boots anymore? They could help someone back at base make it through the winter."

There wasn't anything he could say to that. He wondered how many times she'd had to leave precious supplies and equipment behind because she was being pursued by machines and didn't have the luxury of looting the dead. No one was shooting at them now, that was for sure. And for some reason, that realization made his hackles go up. It didn't feel right — not any of it.

"We should get going," he said by way of reply. "Dyson needs medical attention, and we need to get out of here."

To his surprise, she didn't argue, but finished unlacing the second combat boot and tossed it onto the pile she'd made of her own, copying him by getting another sheet on which to heap her swag. "All right." She got to her feet, made a knot in the sheet, and then turned to Dyson. "How're you feeling now?"

"Don't feel…much of anything."

"Good. Marcus and I are going to get a vehicle and bring it back to the entrance. Hang tight, okay?"

Dyson nodded, but Marcus noted how his fingers rested on the Glock at his hip. The gesture was more symbolic than anything; if there were any machines still wandering Elysium's ruined halls, that sidearm wouldn't do much to take them down. But at least the scientist seemed together enough to have retained some of his self-preservation instincts.

Blair pulled her own gun, then nodded at Marcus. He followed her out of the med center, back down the corridor, and finally up the stairs into the cold night wind. Fires still burned in the distance. God knows how many gallons of fuel there had been in Elysium's vaults. Those fires would probably keep burning for days.

"You don't think it's strange?" he asked Blair, as she strode toward the runway, apparently intent on the Humvees she'd spotted earlier.

"That this part of the base didn't get blown up?"

"Yeah."

The wind was strengthening; it whipped her hair around her face, making it almost impossible to see her expression. "No."

"Why not?"

"Machines focus on what they view as strategic targets. So they'd hit the hangar, the supply depot, the command center. They wouldn't give a shit about the med center or the area around it, which looked like barracks to me. It would be a waste of effort, especially since the personnel were all dead anyway from the gas."

"You ever heard of machines using poison gas before?"

"No. But there's a first time for everything."

That hardly satisfied him, but she didn't seem inclined toward further conversation, as they reached one of the Humvees. She opened the door and looked inside. "I suppose it would've been too much to ask for the keys to still be in the ignition."

"Not a problem," he said at once. Finally they were in a situation where his skills could be useful. "Let me."

Blair moved out of the way, and he used the butt of his pistol to knock the cover off the ignition. From there it was a simple matter of pulling the ignition wires and twisting them together, then doing the same with the starter wires. The Humvee roared into life at once.

"I'm guessing you've done this once or twice before." She sounded almost amused.

"You could say that." He slid into the driver's seat.

This time the wind blew the hair off her face, and he saw her teeth flash in the reflected firelight before she came around the back of the vehicle and climbed in on the passenger side.

They drove for a minute in silence as Marcus maneuvered the Humvee between the debris and abandoned vehicles that littered their route to the med center's entrance. Once they reached their destination, he pulled to a stop, then hesitated. He knew he shouldn't say anything, should just go down and collect Dyson and the loot they'd gathered, and keep his misgivings to himself.

_Oh, the hell with it_. "I don't think splitting up is a good idea."

"Usually it isn't. But since you'll have an F-15 running interference for you, I really don't think you have that much to worry about."

True enough. Still…

"I don't like the thought of being separated from you."

She didn't move, but only sat there, staring out into the fire-lit darkness. Her mouth tightened. Then she reached across the Humvee's transmission tunnel, and he felt her cold fingers wrap around his.

"I don't, either," she said. The military vehicle's interior was not made for intimacy, but somehow she managed to lean toward him, touch him with lips that were as warm as her hands were cold. Just as quickly, she pulled back. "So let's make this quick so we can finish what Barnes interrupted, all right?"

Marcus was out of the Humvee so fast he hardly remembered opening the door. Through the darkness, Blair's laughter floated toward him, incongruous against the backdrop of machine-made destruction. At the moment, he didn't much care what might be waiting for them out in the desert wastes.

All he knew was that now nothing would stop him from getting safely back to the Resistance base.


	8. Chapter 8

Well, this project took longer than I thought when I started it, due to real life and all its intrusions, but here we are at the end. I hope everyone has enjoyed the ride - if you have, I'd love it if you left a review for this chapter, even if you haven't been reviewing all along. The story is complete, as my intention was always to tell Blair and Marcus' story, and not attempt a recounting of the entirety of the Future War. Thank you to everyone for reading, and for all your lovely reviews. (Oh, and also thank you to Atticus Ross for writing the amazing soundtrack to _The Book of Eli_, which is what I listened to while writing the last few chapters of this story.)

* * *

Eight

The Humvee's headlights were two tiny spots of light in a sea of black. Once again Blair circled back, making sure that she never lost visual contact with the vehicle. Even with the F-15 choked back to an almost unbearable 150 miles per hour, she had to keep constantly looping, or she'd overshoot the transport's current location. From time to time she found her foot pushing against the floor of the cockpit, as if subconsciously willing Marcus to go a little heavier on the gas. Stupid, really — the road was in terrible condition, and Dyson had a painful leg fracture. She estimated that the Humvee was doing forty-five, maybe fifty miles an hour, which was still pretty good. It was unrealistic to expect much more than that.

All around her the air was clear, hard and black the way only deserts skies could truly be. No sign of any H-Ks — no sign of anyone at all, except those two determined little lights that continued to head ever westward. She should be relieved. After all, she had only the one Sidewinder left if another Hunter-Killer decided to show its face. She should be glad that they apparently faced no further Skynet intrusions as they made their way back to the Resistance base.

Why, then, did she feel so uneasy, as if haunted by the notion that she'd missed something truly important?

Maybe it was just the memory of those dead soldiers back at Elysium. She'd seen so much death and destruction for most of her life that she knew it really shouldn't get to her anymore, but there was something about those sprawled figures, something about the helpless shapes they'd made against the shining linoleum floors, that got her right in the gut. It was one thing to go down in an open fight, gun still in your hands, and something else altogether to be killed where you stood by something against which you had no defense.

She knew she shouldn't let it get to her. Hell, Dyson seemed to have handled the loss of the base and his compatriots better than she was managing right now. Then again, he was in so much pain and so maxed out on Vicodin it was probably a miracle he could remember his own name. No doubt the grieving process would kick in later.

At least they weren't coming back completely empty-handed, although a motley assortment of pilfered medical supplies wasn't quite the same as a contingent of fighter jets, Humvees, and ground troops. Marcus hadn't been able to understand why the machines didn't level the place completely, but he hadn't seen the untouched hospitals and pharmaceutical factories during the days and weeks after Judgment Day. Skynet only struck out against the machines man could use to continue the fight. The mechanisms in place to keep humans healthy didn't matter to the machines. And anyway, those hospitals and factories were abandoned damn quick, just as soon as people figured out the last place they wanted to be was any spot where the machines thought humans might congregate. Blair supposed she should be thankful for that; if Skynet had taken out the hospitals and the medical centers, it would have been even harder to find medical supplies than it already was.

Once again she circled back, reassured herself with the sight of the Humvee's headlights bobbing along Highway 58. As much as she loved flying the Strike Eagle, she found herself wishing she could be down there with Marcus, trading barbs, or maybe just sharing a companionable silence. The front seat of a Humvee definitely wasn't designed for necking, so she'd have had to hold off on that until they got back to base, but at least she would have been with him.

_Soon_, she told herself, and checked her instruments one more time. The sky was empty; not even a flock of birds showed on the scanners. Even though the trip seemed interminable right now, if nothing stopped them, they'd be home in less than an hour.

And then…

Well, she had a bottle of wine and a few blankets she'd been saving for a special occasion, and she couldn't think of anything more special than being with Marcus for the first time.

Marcus wasn't sure whether Dyson was passed out or just asleep. He supposed it didn't matter much. Either way, the scientist's current comatose state had probably made the return trip to the Resistance base a lot easier.

The Humvee turned down the narrow road that led to the almond farm. Almost there. A few minutes ago, he'd seen Blair's F-15 streak by overhead, angling downward to make its approach. Just a few minutes more, and then he could turn Dyson over to Kate Connor and sneak off with Blair. They had unfinished business, and that kiss she'd given him — had it only been an hour ago? — told him she was just as eager to finish that business as he was.

A pair of Resistance soldiers waited at the open gate to the farm. At first Marcus wondered why the gate stood open, and then he noticed the Strike Eagle off to one side, with Blair already standing next to it. The soldiers waved him in, and he bounced over the ruts and pulled to a stop just a few feet from Blair. She strode up to him.

"Keep going," she said. Her tone was all business, but a certain glint in her eyes told him that she was probably thinking of the quickest way to off-load Dyson. "Pull as close to the medical tent as you can. No point in making Dyson walk any farther than he has to."

"Got it." Marcus eased his way farther into the camp, moving slowly so people could get out of the way. Not that there was a lot of activity at this hour; even the Elysium troops who had been milling around like ants earlier seemed to have retired for the night.

Blair must have radioed ahead; he saw Kate Connor waiting at the entrance to the medical tent, and, to his surprise, John Connor stood next to her. He'd abandoned the wheelchair for his crutches. Marcus hoped that the Resistance leader had at least managed a cat nap while waiting for word from Elysium, but he somehow doubted it. With a little shake of the head, he parked the Humvee and slid out of the driver's seat, just as two of Kate's assistants stepped forward with a stretcher. Dyson roused himself just enough to lift himself from the passenger seat and down to the two waiting med techs. They hoisted the stretcher and then disappeared inside the tent, with Kate Connor just a pace or two behind.

"Blair told us about Dyson," Connor said. "But I wanted to hear what he had to say, so I thought I could debrief him while Kate worked on his leg."

"You can try," Marcus replied, not bothering to keep the skepticism out of his tone. "He's pretty out of it." He gave the other man a quick glance. For some reason, Connor looked even grimmer than usual. The hard lines around his mouth seemed deeper than usual, although that could have just been pain and exhaustion. "You get anything out of Stark?"

"Yes."

"What?"

"Nothing good." And he turned and went inside the tent.

_What was that about?_ Answers would have to wait, though. Since Connor hadn't specifically requested that he stay outside, Marcus slipped into the tent as well. Not that he had any particular interest in seeing Kate Connor set Dyson's broken leg — his brother Neil had shattered his femur once in an ATV accident, and in Marcus' mind that was enough compound fractures for one lifetime — but he wanted to hear what the hell Dyson had been thinking in the first place, to go tearing off to Elysium like that, as well as whether he'd spotted anything unusual before Blair and Marcus had showed up.

They'd transferred Dyson from the stretcher to a gurney, and Kate Connor had just begun to slice away the ruined flight suit to fully expose the lower length of his right leg. The man's face was ashy, rimed with sweat. Marcus wondered whether she'd given him a shot, or whether he was still refusing any anesthetics.

Suddenly, a small, cold hand slid into his, and he looked down to see Blair standing next to him. She flashed him a quick grin, but didn't say anything. That was fine. Enough to know that she was there at his side. He squeezed her fingers, very gently, and then redirected his attention to the operating table.

"You could've gotten yourself killed," Connor said then. He stood just to Kate's right, far enough away so he wouldn't interfere with what she was doing, but close enough that he didn't have to raise his voice.

Dyson's eyes remained shut. Sweat trickled down from one temple to disappear into his ear. Marcus twitched involuntarily. That must tickle. He found himself wondering if one of the med techs was going to wipe the sweat away.

Connor appeared unmoved by the scientist's current discomfort. He went on, in the same hard, flat tones, "Not to mention costing us an F-15 we couldn't afford to lose."

Next to him, Kate Connor worked silently as she finished cutting away the flight suit and then began to sponge the blood off Dyson's injured leg. Marcus tried to keep from wincing as he caught a clearer view of the shattered bone sticking up from the wound. But then he could have sworn he saw —

He blinked, and shook his head, even as Kate exclaimed, "No — _no_!"

The bone fragments fell away, revealing the unmistakable gleam of metal. Dyson sat up, dark eyes flashing red. And Marcus didn't stop to think, didn't stop for anything, but only wrenched his hand from Blair's and bolted forward.

The others seemed slower to react, but of course none of them had been modified by a bunch of mad scientists to outperform any puny human reflexes. He pushed past Kate Connor, knocking her into her husband, who of course must have been Dyson's target all along. They both went down, Connor's crutches giving way beneath the unexpected assault. And then Marcus slammed into Dyson, the collision sending them to the ground in a messy heap.

Stark had been strong, and Dyson was just as powerful. The other cyborg drove a knee up into the small of Marcus' back, and an explosion of agony seared its way up his spine. The room wavered.

No good. Mouthing curses he didn't have the wind to say out loud, Marcus drove his fist into Dyson's jaw. As his — _its_ — head snapped back, Marcus fumbled for his gun. He didn't pretend to be as practiced a machine-killer as the other Resistance fighters, but he'd overheard enough to know that the only way to stop one once and for all was to send a bullet deep into its cybernetic brain, destroying the chip that controlled it.

Shouts and cries filtered to his ears, and he realized the other people in the medical tent had begun to converge on Dyson as well. Someone shot at the cyborg, striking it in the arm. Marcus hoped they'd at least attempted not to hit him when they took the shot. Then again, there were a lot of people who probably wouldn't consider him any great loss.

The gun pulled free of its holster. Dyson, apparently not slowed down at all by the bullet in his arm, reached up to take Marcus by the throat. Steely fingers clenched, shutting down his air passages. No one had told Marcus whether or not his new cyborg body could be killed through asphyxiation, and he knew he didn't want to find out.

A red haze hovered at the edges of his vision. He brought the Beretta up against Dyson's temple and fired.

The cyborg let go of his throat just long enough for Marcus to fire again, and again. He didn't know whether that was enough, but Dyson wasn't moving. Just to be sure, Marcus slid off its limp body and turned it over, then fired into the back of its head until the clip was empty.

The gunshots continued to echo in his ears. Someone touched his shoulder, and he whirled, only to see Blair standing behind him, her Glock out and pointed at Dyson's prone form.

"I think you got him, Tex," she said.

Marcus nodded, and, wincing a little, staggered to his feet. On the other side of the gurney he could see the two shaken med techs helping John Connor stand up as well. The Resistance leader's face had gone dead white, but as he gazed across the tent at Marcus, an incongruous smile pulled at his mouth.

"Looks like we just found our third infiltrator."

* * *

For some reason, Blair couldn't keep her hands from shaking, so she wrapped them around her mug of coffee — real coffee from the stores Elysium had sent over — and tried without much success to keep from staring at Marcus. Bruise marks stood out, livid and blue black, against his throat. But he was alive.

And Dyson…

…Dyson never had been, apparently. At least, not the Dyson they'd brought back with them from Elysium.

Seeming to understand that everyone was too jangled and keyed-up to retire for the night, Connor had asked Blair and Marcus, as well as Barnes and some of his other lieutenants, to come back to the command tent for a debriefing. Once there, he explained that the technicians had been able to glean from Stark's chip that he had been one of three infiltrator units Serena Kogan's crew had designed and created.

"Marcus was the prototype, far as we can tell," Connor said. He didn't have coffee, but instead a glass of water, from which he took frequent sips. That taut look was back on Kate's face, the one that said she knew her husband walked the knife edge of collapse, but she appeared willing to sit at his side and allow him to do this, at least until she deemed it medically unsafe.

Next to Blair, Marcus shifted. She knew he hated being discussed in such terms. Human beings, after all, weren't prototypes. Any words of reassurance would have to wait until later, though.

"We'll never know exactly what happened, why Marcus was left in an abandoned facility. Stark had been at Elysium from before Judgment Day, and Dyson…" He paused, and drank some more water.

"That's what I don't understand," Marcus said. "If Dyson was a cyborg, why didn't he kill you as soon as Stark failed? No one would have seen that coming."

"That Dyson wasn't a cyborg."

Blair shot a quick sideways glance at Marcus, who gave the smallest of shrugs. "What?"

Connor gave them both a grim smile. "I'm pretty sure the Dyson you first met at Elysium, the one who came back here with the troops, was the real Dyson. The cyborg would have been waiting somewhere at Elysium, in hiding until the time was right."

"A sleeper…" Blair breathed. She'd heard rumors of such things, of machines programmed to lie in wait for months or even years, but she'd never encountered one until now.

Marcus appeared unconvinced. "I don't get it. We were with Dyson the whole time. When would the machine have been able to make the swap?"

"No, we weren't," Blair replied. Maybe it was the caffeine coursing through her veins and sharpening her brain, but a clearer picture was beginning to emerge. "We saw Dyson's F-15 get shot down, but we never actually saw him eject, did we? We found someone who looked like Dyson on the ground, wrapped in a parachute."

"Oh," said Marcus. Then, "_Oh_."

"Exactly," Connor agreed. "Stark must have sent some sort of signal before he was completely out of commission, and the sleeper Dyson gassed the base and blew up the critical areas. The real Dyson knew what the radio silence meant and went running back — just as they expected he would." Another one of those grim smiles quirked at the edges of his mouth. "Guess we humans are more predictable than we'd like to believe."

Not a thought Blair really wanted to entertain, not when it meant the machines could anticipate humans' movements with uncanny accuracy. But she told herself John Connor wasn't Daniel Dyson. Connor had managed to keep them safe for years. Now she knew it was partly because he could be capricious, difficult to pin down.

"What about the bones?" she asked. "We saw the goddamn bone sticking out of his leg!"

Kate Connor spoke then. "Advanced camouflage. We saw that in Stark's extremities as well once we continued with the autopsy, although not to the degree utilized in Dyson. Bone tissue grown and molded around the endoskeleton. It could shatter and break like normal bones — as you saw. Pretty good subterfuge, when you think about it."

Blair didn't want to think about it, didn't want to think how close she and Marcus had come to getting John Connor killed by bringing that thing back to base. And she wanted to think even less about how the machines seemed to be coopting human elements bit by bit. At the rate they were going, when would the line between man and machine become completely blurred?

"Are there any more?" Marcus asked abruptly.

Connor didn't bother to ask him what he meant. "From the information we gathered, it seems there were three infiltrators built, and now all three are accounted for. Not to say that Skynet didn't continue with the program after Stark was inserted at Elysium, but we think that's it."

"Good," said Marcus. He pushed back his seat, and put one hand to his throat. "Because I'm tired of fighting advanced versions of myself." With a scowl, he stood, almost knocking over his chair in the process, and then stalked from the tent.

Somehow, Blair couldn't quite meet John Connor's eyes. "I'd better go check on him," she said quickly, and got up from her seat as well. Let Connor — and the rest of them — think what they wanted. Right now she only wanted to be with Marcus, to reassure him that she didn't think he was a prototype, or an infiltrator…or a machine. Hell, no one had even thanked him for saving John Connor's life again. Pretty shabby treatment, if you asked her. Marcus should be judged by his deeds, not by the metal skeleton beneath his skin.

The camp was a little livelier than it should be for such a late hour. Not surprising, considering the skirmish in the medical tent. Blair wove her way through the crowds, looking for Marcus' tall form. She didn't see any signs of him. Then she paused to consider, and smiled and nodded.

She had a pretty good idea where she could find him.

* * *

A layer of high cirrus clouds coated the sky, so the moon, now a few degrees past its zenith, wasn't as bright as it had been the last time he stood here. Was that only a few hours ago? Time didn't seem to make much sense anymore. It jiggered and zigzagged and didn't want to follow a straight line. Just like him, he supposed. He'd never been very good about staying inside the lines.

"I'm glad the moon is still up."

He turned then and saw Blair paused on the path a few feet away from him. She held a beat-up duffel bag that hung loosely from one hand. The stream flashed quicksilver just behind her. Nonplussed, he only stared back at her.

"It's pretty, don't you think?" She knelt and trailed the fingers of her free hand in the water; little droplets splashed up, flickering diamonds in the moonlight.

"I guess so."

She smiled at him, just as bright and lovely as the shimmering water. A woman wouldn't smile like that at a machine, would she?

"By the way," she added, after straightening and taking a few steps toward him. "Thank you."

"For what?"

"Saving John Connor. Of course you deserve a lot more than just a 'thank you,' but I thought we should at least start there."

Was that why she had followed him here, out of some sense of obligation? "You would have done the same. I just moved faster, that's all."

"That's all," she repeated. "I'd say it was a bit more than that, and I'm sorry no one else saw fit to thank you for it."

"It's no — " he began, and she interrupted,

"Don't you dare say it's no big deal." Now she looked more than a little upset; her eyebrows creased, and she planted her hands on her hips as she stared up at him.

He didn't know what to say, didn't know how to confront her righteous anger. So he glanced down at the duffel she held and asked, "What's in the bag?"

Almost as quickly as it had come, the frown erased itself from her brow, and she sent a grin in his direction that somehow made him forget the cold night air. "Supplies."

"Supplies?"

With one hand she tugged at the zipper of the duffel, then pulled out a bottle. "It's not champagne, but it's still a pretty damn good '97 pinot noir."

That was about the last thing he had been expecting. Marcus stared at Blair for a few seconds, then down at the bottle of wine, then back up at her. "Where the hell did you get that?"

"Won it off some dumb-ass who didn't believe a woman could beat him at Texas Hold 'Em." Her dark eyes glinted with laughter, echoes of the moonlit flashes of the creek behind her.

"You're a talented woman, aren't you?"

She shrugged, but her mouth curved a little. "Let me show you just how talented."

* * *

The old farmhouse had been left mostly alone. Marcus guessed that Connor's people had done a sweep for squatters or anything else that might have taken up residence in the abandoned structure, but, despite the dust and a general air of neglect, it probably didn't look that different from the way it had when people still lived here. Some of the furniture was gone — broken up for firewood, most likely — but a faded Persian rug still covered the living room floor, and plain muslin curtains hung at the windows.

By some unspoken agreement they settled here on the rug, with the blankets Blair carried in her duffel bag spread out on the floor. She'd brought a couple of collapsible plastic drinking cups with her as well, and Marcus poured an equal measure into each one before he handed Blair her drink.

"So what are we celebrating?" he asked.

"You," she replied.

"Come again?"

"Just go with it. Cheers."

She held up her cup, so he raised his as well and bumped it awkwardly against hers.

"Sorry it's not Waterford," she said.

He hadn't never drunk out of a real crystal glasses, so he wasn't regretting any Waterford now. Hell, the people he'd hung with had thought they were being classy when they drank out of beer bottles instead of cans.

Since he'd never been a wine drinker, he didn't have much context for what he tasted now, but something about it seemed at home here, as if it had been grown on hillsides not unlike the ones surrounding the almond farm. It tasted of fruit long gone, and rich soil, and the warmth of a sun the world had lost forever.

For some reason his throat grew tight, and he had a hard time swallowing the mouthful of wine. Must've been the damage cyborg-Dyson had inflicted earlier.

He looked up from the plastic cup to see Blair watching him, her face intent and still, and somehow more beautiful than it had ever been, as if the filtered moonlight and the one small crank-operated lantern she'd brought had somehow combined to highlight unexpected planes and shadows in her features. It was almost the face of a statue, or something carved in a temple wall.

"You all right, Marcus?" she asked.

For some reason he couldn't take another sip of the wine. He hesitated, not wanting her to hear the thickness in his throat, or see the sting of crazy tears that touched his eyes. He really must be losing it.

Then she reached over to him and took the cup from his hand, set it on a rickety little plant stand that had probably survived because it didn't have enough wood to be worth breaking up. And her mouth was on his, tasting of wine, and her hair, impossibly soft, tumbled across his cheek. Somehow they were lying on the blanket, limbs entwined, as he held her close to him, every nerve ending seeming to sense her heat, the lithe strength of her body. Her fingers worked at the zipper of his flight suit, and then it was open, and she pulled it away from him, tugged at the T-shirt he wore underneath.

Of course there was no heat in the farmhouse, and he should have been cold now that his torso was bare, but not now, not when Blair's touch had awakened a heat in him he hadn't felt since he arrived in the world of Judgment Day. He had to feel her as well, and fumbled with the zipper of her own suit. She laughed a little, a low chuckle that sounded almost like a purr, and yanked at the zipper, wriggling out of the flight suit so she lay against him wearing only a tank top. But soon that was gone, and it was only bare skin to bare skin, the glory of her breasts under his hands, the taut muscles of her legs wrapping around his.

He had to taste her, taste every inch of her. She buried her fingers in his short-cropped hair and groaned, pressing to him, opening herself to his tongue. And he waited until she bucked up against him, and then slid into her, letting out a moan of his own as her heat surrounded him, welcoming him, letting him become one with her.

The white-hot explosion might as well have been a nuclear bomb. He somehow managed to keep from collapsing against her, and instead rolled to one side as he lay against the scratchy Army-issue blankets, his breath coming in harsh gasps.

Blair was the first to move. After a minute or so, she sat up, quite calmly retrieved her tank top and underwear, and wriggled back into it. Then she reached for their abandoned cups of wine and picked them up.

"You ready for a drink now?"

Marcus wasn't sure he could do much of anything except lie there and pant like a man who'd just finished an Iron Man competition, but after a few more seconds he sat up, grabbed his own underwear, and nodded. Turned out he was pretty thirsty.

Without comment, she handed him his cup, and he drank deeply, this time enjoying the fruit and the heat as it washed over his tongue and down his throat. He noticed that Blair drank slowly, savoring each sip, her eyes half shut. Or maybe that was just the aftermath of their little interlude. He wondered where she'd ever learned to enjoy wine — after all, she'd been just a high school kid when the bombs dropped.

Then again, he was discovering wine didn't have to be an acquired taste. He sure was enjoying this one. Or maybe it was just who he happened to be sharing it with.

When she finally did speak, her words were about the last thing he expected. "What do you miss the most?"

"Huh?" It could have been the wine, or just the effects of being with Blair, but either way his brain didn't seem to be working as fast as it normally did.

"From before. What do you miss the most?"

He lowered his cup and watched her for a few seconds. She had her knees drawn up to her chest, with her arms wrapped around them and her fingers loosely laced around each other with the wine cup held in between. In that position, her legs looked impossibly long. He still couldn't quite comprehend that a woman like her would want to be with him, either the larcenous Marcus of the old days, or the new Serena Kogan–improved version with his metal skeleton and jury-rigged brain. But she was here, looking at him quite seriously, her face grave and quiet and heartbreakingly beautiful. It was not the face of a woman who regretted anything she had done.

With no hesitation, he said, "I don't miss anything."

Her eyes widened, unbelieving.

"Back then, I had nothing. I _was_ nothing." He paused, wishing he weren't the type who always fumbled over his words whenever he had something important to say. "But here — now — I have you. So how I could I want anything else?"

Still she was silent for a long moment, one in which he started to think that maybe he'd just made an idiot of himself, that she really didn't think anything of him except a quick lay, something new and exotic. Then she set down her wine and and moved toward him, and her arms went around him as she kissed him, again and again, until the world was nothing but her, nothing but Blair, forever and amen.

Much later, as she slept in his arms, he sat and watched a sullen sun rise through the living room's east-facing windows. The sun was red, bloody as the war that had cost the lives of so many. Maybe he was crazy for thinking this was better, for thinking he had more of a chance here than he ever had in his old life. But then he glanced down at the woman he held, watched the rising sun bring out sparks of copper and bronze in her dark hair, and knew this was the place he was meant to be.

In leaving the only world he had ever known, Marcus Wright had come home.


End file.
